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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY STUDIES 
IN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 



THE GROUND AND GOAL 

OF 

HUMAN LIFE 



BY THE 


SAME 


AUTHOR 


Christianity and 


Modern 


Culture. 1906. 


The Precinct of 


Religion. 


1908. 


The Value and 


Dignity 


of Human Life. 


1911. 






The Ego and its Place in 


the World. 191 3. 



THE 
GROUND AND GOAL 



HUMAN LIFE 



By 

CHARLES GRAY SHAW, Ph.D. 

Professor of Ethics 
New York U?iiversity 




THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS 

32 Waverly Place, New York City 
1919 



•#* 



3 



^5" 



Copyright 1919, by 
The New York University Press 



THE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS 

COMMITTEE 01* PUBLICATION 

Arthur Huntington Nason, Ph.D., Chairman 
Director of the Press 

i i I ■ ' ; 

Earle Brownell Babcock, Ph.D. 

\ 
Harold Dickinson Senior, M.B., Sc.D., F.R.C.S. 






The Kennebec Journal Press 

augusta, maine 



TO 
MY MOTHER 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/groundgoalofhuma01shaw 



PREFACE 

THE work contained in the following pages ex- 
presses, as it were, a treaty of peace between 
the forces of Individualism here and those of 
scientifico-social thought there. To one who has fol- 
lowed the parallel histories of egoism militant on the 
one side and naturalism triumphant on the other, the 
present situation appears full of promise for a future 
understanding between man and the things and per- 
sons around him. For the comprehension of this situ- 
ation, one can do no better than to conduct an analytical 
review of the way in which the effort toward selfhood 
has expressed itself; just such a progressive delineation 
of individualism has engrossed the first two parts of 
the present work. The third, which is the progressive 
portion of the book, seeks to show in just what way 
man may re-relate his mind to nature, in what cor- 
responding manner the individual may seek new repose 
in the social order. New years bring new problems 
with them ; and, when the times are as suggestive as 
those of the new peace, it becomes imperative that one 
should cast about for new ideals. To the restricted 
number of individuals who are tempted to persist in 
the old anarchism of individualism in its ante-bellum 
days, it may be suggested that newer, deeper types of 
nationalism may offer to such liberals something like 
the social environment which their nature seems to 
demand. Those who before the war felt themselves 
' superfluous ' may come to the realization that even 
the most delicious, the most dissatisfied personality 
may find his place in the political world-order. 

While the present attempt to arrive at the ground 
of human existence and the goal of man's striving 
may seem to call upon the old-time ego to be less of a 
non-conformist, it does not fail to point out that the 



viii THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

opposing forces known familiarly as science and social 
philosophy should not continue in the assumption that 
they have uttered the last word for man's nature or 
given the supreme command to his will. These objec- 
tive principles are none the less due for appropriate 
revision in order that they may make room for every 
one who strives after the joy, worth, and truth of his 
own precious life. A new view of the individual de- 
mands a new view of the world. The scientific and 
social critics of subjectivity and personality have been 
prone to set aside man's belief in himself in the same 
way that Moliere's Doctor in Spite of Himself sought 
to explain to the patient that the heart was no longer 
to the left or the liver to the right ; for, said the 
' doctor,' " we have changed all that — nous avons 
change tout cela." It is needless to point out that the 
location of the individual in his own private life is far 
less mutable than scientific rumor might suggest. 

In printing this work, it is both the desire and the 
duty of the author to make most generous acknowl- 
edgement of the assistance given by Professor Arthur 
Huntington Nason, Ph.D., who, as Director of New 
York University Press, has edited the manuscript, cor- 
rected the proofs, and made the index. For his patience 
he must be praised and for his furtherance thanked. 
Moreover, it may be stated that the material here 
written out in extenso has been used already as the 
basis for a 'course in Ethics in the Graduate School of 
New York University, so that students in that course 
deserve some thanks for the way in which they have 
co-operated with the writer in developing a principle 
of ethical thought. 

C. G. S. 
University Heights 
New York 
September 
1919 



CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 3 

The Problem 4 

1. Selfhood, Scientism, and Sociality 5 

2. The Anti-Scientific and Anti-social 29 

3. The Higher Synthesis 12 

BOOK ONE 

THE GROUND OF LIFE IN NATURE 17 
Part One 

The Naturalization of Life 19 

I. The Transmutation of Mind and World 19 

1. The Self as Thinker 21 

2. The Empirical Ego 25 

II. The Actual Naturalisation of Life 33 

1. The Surrender to Naturalism 34 

2. The Ambiguous Elevation of the Physical 40 

(1) The— Naturalistic and Flumanistic ,11 

(2) The Objective and Subjective 47 

3. The Elevation of the Biological 52 

(1) Positivism and Humanism 53 

(2) Biology and Psychology 57 

III. The Insufficiency of Scientism 62 

1. The Sensational Inadequacy of Scientism 63 

2. The Volitional Impotence of Scientism 70 

3. The Intellectual Disappointment of Scientism. ... 75 

Part Two 
The Struggle for Selfhood 

I. The Struggle for the Joy of Life 87 

1. The Inward Enjoyment of Life 38 

2. The Independence of Soul-States 97 

3. The Rights of Aestheticism 107 

(1) The Aesthetic and Analytic 108 



x THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

(2) Aestheticism as Individualism 116 

II. The Struggle for the Worth of Life 121 

1. Selfhood in Worth 122 

2. The Individualistic Initiative 133 

3. The Demands of Immoralism 145 

III. The Struggle for the Truth of Life 163 

1. The Truth of Selfhood 164 

(1) The Passion for Predication 165 

(2) Humanistic Criteria of Truth 170 

2. The Affirmation of the Self 175 

3. The Claims of Irreligion i85 

BOOK TWO 

THE GOAL OF LIFE IN SOCIETY 205 
Part One 

The Socialization of Life 207 

I. The Transvaluation of Self and Society 20S 

1. Selfhood in Selfishness 209 

2. Selfhood in Strength 220 

II. The Practical Socialization of Life 225 

1. The Socialization of Work 226 

2. The Socialization of Morality 234 

(1) The Social Source of Morality 235 

(2) The Social Sanction of Morality 243 

III. The Inadequacy of the Social 252 

1. Lack of Life-Content in Sociality 253 

2. Lack of Life-Character in Sociality 263 

Part Two 

The Repudiation of Sociality 273 

I. Life the Place of Joys 274 

1. Humanity and Happiness 275 

( 1 ) Happiness as Willed 277 

(2) The Consciousness of Plappiness 287 

2. The Individual as Decadent 292 

(1) The Aesthetic Form of Decadence 293 

(2) The Anti-Social Character of Decadence. . 297 
II. Life the Place of Values 304 

1. The Humanistic Nature of Value 304 

(1) Value and Desire 305 

(2) Values as Volitional 311 



CONTENTS xi 

2. The Individual as Pessimist 318 

(1) Pessimism as Nihilism 318 

(2) The Pessimism of Will 324 

III. Life the Place of Truths 330 

1. Truth and Life 331 

( 1 ) Sociality and Truth 332 

(2) Humanity and Truth 338 

2. The Individual as Skeptic 342 

(1) Skepticism as Dilettantism 343 

(2) Social Skepticism 349 

BOOK THREE 

THE HIGHER SYNTHESIS 363 
Part One 

The Joy of Life in the World-Whole 366 

I. One's Own Life 367 

1. Egoism and Individualism 368 

2. Naturistic Possibilities of Selfhood 374 

3. Social Possibilities of Selfhood 383 

II. The Enjoyment of Existence 391 

1. Joy and Pleasure 392 

2. The Aesthetic Nature of Enjoyment 400 

3. Enjoyment as Vision 410 

III. The Aesthetic Synthesis 416 

1. The Aesthetic Synthesis with Nature 417 

2. The Aesthetic Synthesis with Humanity 426 

Part Two 

The Worth of Life in the World-Whole 437 

I. One's Own Work 438 

1. The Truth of Work in Nature 439 

(1) Work as Creative 439 

(2) Work as Intelligible 444 

2. The Worth of Work 447 

(1) The Eudaemonistic Element in Work 448 

(2) The Characteristic Element in Work 452 

II. The Character of World-Work 458 

1. The Freedom of Work 459 

2. The Value of Work 470 



xii THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

III. The Practical Synthesis 480 

1. The Hedonic Synthesis 480 

( 1 ) Naturalism and Nihilism 481 

(2) Sociality and Humanity 486 

2. Value as Synthetic Principle 494 

(1) Man as Valuer ,.. 496 

(2) Humanity a World of Values 501 

Part Three 

The Truth of Life in the World- Whole 509 

I. One's Own Self 510 

1. The Self as Knower 512 

2. Selfhood and Solipsism 520 

3. Individualism and Nominalism 528 

II. Knowledge as Intellectual Life 536 

1. The Understanding as Human 537 

2. The Origin and Ground of Knowledge 542 

3. The Object of Knowledge 551 

III. The Intellectual Synthesis 555 

1. Knowledge as Interpretation 556 

2. The Essence of Subjectivity 564 

3. The Character of Objectivity 572 



INTRODUCTION 

OF all the problems which confront the philo- 
sophic mind, none is superior to or more im- 
portant than a form of inquiry which seeks to 
relate the individual to the world. The special form 
which this problem assumes expresses itself in terms of 
" subjectivity " and " objectivity," although these con- 
ventional methods of speech may fail to convey to the 
reflective mind the significance of the problem and the 
severity of the situation in connection with which that 
problem must be discussed. The subjective includes 
the human self with its perpetual tendency to say, " I 
think " and " I will," while the objective has direct 
reference to the organized realms of the physical and 
political, the scientific and the social. To the individ- 
ualistic " I think," the physical order may not respond ; 
to the subjective " I will," the social order may pay no 
heed. As a result, the thinker may feel forced to 
resort to a sharp subjectivism which declares, " le monde 
n'existe pas pour moi," or he may relapse into a sullen 
objectivism which feels no sense of responsibility for 
that which is unique in human life. The form of phi- 
losophy which seeks to meet this problem of human life 
in the world, may, for want of a more adequate term, 
be called Philosophy of Life; that which is peculiar to 
such a method of speculation is its attempted combina- 
tion of the metaphysical and the moral. It might seem 
as though one could examine the forms of the world 
without taking into account the leading species which 
that world has produced, just as it might appear plau- 
sible when one asserts that he may pursue his ethics 
without asking questions concerning the nature of the 
world in which the ethical subject is to exhibit its ideals. 



4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

Indeed, traditional metaphysics here and traditional 
ethics there have agreed to divide the twin fields be- 
tween; hence moralist and metaphysician separated 
much after the manner of Lot and Abraham. Now 
philosophy of life proceeds upon the assumption that 
such separation is injurious. 

THE PROBLEM 

Can man be himself? Has he a right to attempt a 
passage outward from the subjective " I think " to an 
objective "I am"? This is the question which philo- 
sophy of life feels constrained to propose, even when 
it realizes that the self-satisfied thought of the day is 
inclined to assume that the self is all that it may hope 
to be. Nothing in the realm of contemporary culture 
is more confusing than the fact that those who have the 
least interest in the human self, the scientific and social 
thinkers, have persisted in assuming that that self exists, 
while those who have the most interest in the self, the 
aesthetical, ethical, and religious individualists, are never 
guilty of taking the self for granted. The objective 
thinker should say, " the self does not exist," and should 
go his scientifico-social way rejoicing; the subjective 
thinker should say, " the self does exist " and no longer 
seek to affirm the ego. The actual situation is the very 
reverse of this which would seem to be the expected 
one. Individualism feels called upon to regard the self, 
not as a physical fact, but as that which can come into 
being only after due self -affirmation. If there were no 
world of things, individualism might rejoice in sheer 
selfhood; but the world of things does exist, so that the 
human self, instead of silhouetting itself against the 
blue of spiritual life, must strive to shine through the 
opaqueness of an alien world-order. Man is everything 
else but himself, while his most natural tendency is to 



INTRODUCTION 5 

elaborate forms of thought which ever tend to eliminate 
himself from the world. 

Can man do his work; or, has man a work which he 
may call his own? If it is hard to say, "I am," it is 
no less difficult to assert, " I do " ; for the inner life is 
usually marked by a decided nescio and non facio. Were 
there no social order, and did the ego feel free to act 
upon his own initiative, self-activity and the joy of self- 
expression would take their place in the inner conscious- 
ness of the self-propelled individual; but, with the actual 
conditions of social life hemming the individual about, 
pervading his nature within, it is evident that self- 
expression must be impelled from within outward in 
opposition to the alien forces of the larger human order. 
Man does everything but his own work; his most nat- 
ural motive is to will himself out of the world of work. 
To the metaphysical doubt concerning the existence of 
the self in the natural order, there is thus added a moral 
compunction as to the right one has to express himself 
in the social world; apparently, it were vain for the 
individual to think of self -existence, while it were vicious 
for him to pretend to do that which he calls " his own 
work." As metaphysics has surrendered its forms to 
impersonal nature, morality has loaned its forces to the 
selfless social order ; hence, there is no true " I am," 
no just " I do." 

1. Selfhood, Scientism and Sociality 

The fact of an introvertive, introactive selfhood 
seems, then, both dubious and dangerous; the indi- 
vidual may think all things save his own being, may do 
all works except his own. Under what circumstances 
has this extraordinary condition of non-egoism arisen, 
and to what degree is our modern thought responsible 
for the plight into which the human self is now plunged ? 



6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

The thought of selfhood did not arise until the inception 
of modern philosophy, even when the actual " I am " 
had long rejoiced in its interior and unconscious exist- 
ence ; and, with the coming of individualism, there arose 
the tendencies which were conspiring to effect its ban- 
ishment. Modern thought has divided itself into two 
periods, one rationalistic the other positivistic, in which 
the fate of the human self has been, first, that of a 
confident self-assertion, then, that of a deliberate self- 
negation. Where modern thought began with a system 
of reason and rights which did not flinch from solipsism 
and egoism, it has turned to a scheme of the scientific 
and the social in which a perfect subjectivism gives way 
before a complete objectivism. In such a world as our 
contemporary one, the individual says, " I am not," " I 
do nothing." 

The egoism of the Enlightenment, imperfect as it 
appears in the eyes of the contemporary individualist, 
had the will and the power to negate a mediaeval traditio 
and affirm a resolute ratio; in place of the one-time 
auctoritas, it did not hesitate to insert a bold jus; thus 
arose the ." I think " and the " I do " of our modern 
thought; thus arose a characteristic irreligion of reason, 
an equally original immoralism of rights. In the midst 
of this plain and deliberate individualism, the conflict 
between the ideas of establishment and egoism was such 
as to result in an immediate victory for the forces which 
made for an inner life of independent initiatives, and it 
was only because the forces of self-assertion were so 
thoroughly taken up with resistance and defence that 
the failure to attribute content and character to the self 
led to the defeat of that self. The fortifications were 
strong enough, but the supplies were insufficient; hence 
the individualism of the Enlightenment failed from lack 
of nourishment. At the same time, this earlier form 
of individualism may have suffered from the want of 



INTRODUCTION 7 

that stimulus which comes from strong opposition; at 
any rate, the mechanical metaphysics and altruistic 
morality of the period failed to penetrate the surface 
of the confident " I am " and " I do," and the egoism 
of that time simply lapsed. 

A more thorough analysis of the Enlightenment's 
egoism reveals more perfectly the secret of the problem 
as it was then proposed, as it was subsequently resumed. 
What is individualism? Who is the self? What is its 
work? To these questions, the Enlightenment made no 
sufficient answer. The self of that time, so far as it 
assumed a speculative form, was felt to consist in 
nothing more than self-consciousness; to be one's self 
is to feel one's self. This individualistic premise failed 
to produce its just conclusion, because it did not evoke 
the sterner soul-stuff out of which selfhood must come; 
it did not affirm the self. On the ethical side of the 
argument, the question, " What is my work ? " failed 
from an utterance equally feeble. The hedonistic mor- 
alist could find in the ego nothing more characteristic 
than the sense of self-love, whereby the self was felt, 
but not willed. Now self-consciousness and self-love 
are attributes which are singularly inadequate to ex- 
press and exploit the essense and power of the ego, as 
this ego now conceives of itself. 

The resumption of individualism in the age of posi- 
tivism, having no system of reason and rights to fur- 
ther it, was called upon to affirm its being and assert 
its character in the face of opposition, as this came 
from an unfriendly science and an equally inimical 
sociality. In the light of these twin tendencies, man 
was conceived of as a thing among others in a world 
which was strangely indifferent to the inner character 
of human life, just as he was further viewed as a sub- 
ject having no other place or meaning than that which 
could be attributed to him by a social philosophy. 



8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

Now science holds out to the self none of the promises 
once offered by reason, while society is calculated to 
afford none of the forfeited advantages of the philo- 
sophy of rights. Both the scientific and the social are 
by nature anti-individualistic; so that that which is 
unique can find no place in the physical and political 
thinking of the day. For a century, we have accus- 
tomed ourselves to consider the " scientific " as a final 
authority, just as we have accepted the verdict of the 
" social " as the decision of the highest human court. 
What is error? That which is unscientific. What is 
sin? That which is unsocial. 

At the present time, when science has advanced far 
beyond the mind which originally produced it, we find 
mankind somewhat disconcerted at the outlook which 
the world presents to his philosophic vision. In the 
midst of this perplexity, where man is not quite sure 
of this world, there has arisen the feeling that, perhaps, 
science has not fulfilled its prophecies, that evolution 
has not kept its word with the species. In the same 
skeptical spirit, we are beginning to distrust the social 
alignment of ideals; so that both organic and social 
evolution are deemed less and less authentic. The 
individual, whose peculiar interests have so long been 
flouted, seems to be more and more discontented with 
the thought that, as an " I think," he is but an inter- 
loper in the exterior world, while, as an " I do," he is 
considered superfluous, if not vicious. Suppose one is 
unscientific; does it follow that he thus loses the truth 
of life? Suppose he is unsocial; shall we assume that 
he likewise loses the worth of life? The fruits of the 
world and of humanity have ripened on the tree of life, 
but they refuse to fall into the basket of the individual; 
the individual must shake the tree. If the scientifico- 
social order now refuses to make room for the indi- 
vidual, the individual will need to elbow his way 



INTRODUCTION 9 

through the crowd of impersonal facts and forces as 
they gather about him. Now this reaction of the indi- 
vidual is nothing new; the history of the egoistic revolt 
is contemporary with the course of the scientific and 
the social. 

2. The; Anti-Scientific and Anti-Social, 

The individualistic repudiation of the scientific con- 
ception of the world and of the social estimate of man 
has been based almost exclusively upon the ideas and 
impulses peculiar to the aesthetic consciousness of the 
nineteenth century. The more complete analysis of 
the individualistic situation may show that, even in the 
Enlightenment, there were traces of anti-scientific irra- 
tionalism, anti-social immoralism; but it should appear 
that it was Romanticism and its dark shadow, Deca- 
dence, which placed the individual upon his feet, and 
that for the first time in the whole history of humanity. 
Romanticism differed from rationalism at points which 
have been the most critical for the development of 
individualism ; Romanticism was impressed with the 
idea that the individualism triumphant, as this was cele- 
brated in the Enlightenment, could not come to man as 
his kingdom until there had been an individualism mili- 
tant; so that it is the polemical in individualism which 
will be found to afford the most essential and most 
influential element in the individualism of the present. 

In particular, Romantic individualism differs from 
its prototype in that, where the earlier period was con- 
tent to premise a selfhood in self-consciousness, the 
later one insisted upon an active " I am," which refused 
to abandon its program even when it was confronted 
by the irrational. In the same manner, where the pre- 
liminary individualism sought to settle accounts with 
the ethical and social by means of naive self-love, the 



IO THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

more perfect formulation of the doctrine found the 
egoist in a position where he defied the social and willed 
the self. In this manner, self-existence arose as an ideal 
superior to that of scientific " truth," while self-expres- 
sion was carried on, even when it seemed to threaten 
the ideal of social " duty." It will sound both strange 
and strident when we say that, having taken its stand 
upon the ideal of aesthetic personality, having made 
beauty supreme, romantic individualism felt free to 
receive or to reject the principles of the true and the 
good; nevertheless, such was the case, and by such 
means the individual was emancipated. 

This vigorous doctrine of individualism, which thus 
issued its challenge to scientific metaphysics and social 
morality, far from exhausting itself in revolt — as a 
debater grows so weary in getting the floor that he 
has no strength left for his speech — was able to give 
definite expression to its doctrine, was able to answer 
that questions, "Who am I?" "What shall I do?" 
Romantic individualism finds expression in joy, in 
action, in truth; in the pursuit of these ideals, it pro- 
duced an aestheticism, an immoralism, an irrationalism ; 
and from the original intuition of joyous selfhood, it 
proceeded to think its own thoughts, perform its own 
deeds. From the earlier ideal of selfhood in self-love, 
no such happy result had followed; so that it was first 
in the nineteenth century that individualism became a 
doctrine as such. 

The progress of the anti-scientific and anti-social, as 
our subsequent analysis of it will show, consisted in 
opposing the inherent sense of the joy of life to a 
view of nature which refused to credit the inner life, 
in an initiative equally in opposition to a science which 
refused to authenticate human strivings, in a culture 
which found nothing credible in the prosaic intellect- 
ualism with its anti-mystical tendencies. On the social 



INTRODUCTION II 

side, the conflict will be found to have renewed itself 
in a defiant Decadence, assumed in contrast to the 
inferior enjoyments of the established state, in a pes- 
simism which neutralized the half-values of social life, 
in a skepticism which saw nothing true in social ideas. 
In the midst of this triple negation of both science and 
society, individualism developed a more positive char- 
acter, when it maintained that the inner life was a 
joyous, valuable, and veritable one, just as it intimated 
that the scientific view of nature was not large or 
rich enough to contain the self, the social estimate of 
humanity equally incapable of contenting the self- 
affirming individual. 

The shortcomings of the Romantic revolt appear at 
once in the persistently polemical attitude; for the 
elaboration of a concrete, humanistic content for the 
individual's life was often tainted by the unsound argu- 
ments and imperfect motives which the egoist advanced. 
Man must be himself; failing to find in either science 
or society the sense of joy which he seeks, has he the 
philosophic right to resort to the aesthetically decadent? 
Can we justify him, when, dismayed at the discovery 
that exterior life has no genuine values for him, he 
seeks relief in pessimistic immoralism? Is true indi- 
vidualism advanced by one who, finding no truth in the 
scientjfico-social world, feels free to further his egoistic 
ideals by indulging in irrationalistic skepticism? This 
question, of supreme importance to the individualism of 
the future, may be answered in the following manner. 
When threats of the scientific and the social were so 
severe that all sense of selfhood seemed to be in vain, 
the decadent egoist was, for the time, justified in assum- 
ing the attitude of aestheticism, immoralism, irrational- 
ism; nevertheless, this morbid method of formulating 
the individualistic argument can never be accepted as 
anything more than a means to a superior end. When, 



12 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

as in contemporary thought, the battle for individualism 
has been won, it becomes necessary to restate the ideas 
of joy, worth, and truth, in such a way as shall make 
them more authentic, more healthful. Furthermore, it 
is incumbent upon the individualist, who complains that 
the natural and social world do not contain or express 
the meaning of his interior life, to describe what kind 
of exterior order would thus afford him the true place 
of the self. 

3. The Higher Synthesis 

That which the individualist is expected to abandon 
is the extreme of a doctrine which vitiated the power 
of its contention when it resorted to the decadent, the 
immoralistic, the irrationalistic ; that which he may be 
allowed to keep as his egoistic own is the inherent sense 
of the inner life as one of joy, worth, and truth. What, 
we may ask, should be the features of an external world 
of nature and humanity, in which the eudaemonistic, 
the ethical, and the religious world obtain? The career 
of individualism cannot fail to show that science does 
not give us Nature, that social thinking does not present 
Humanity; the scientific has drawn a small circle about 
an extensive subject, the social has been equally narrow 
in circumscribing its chosen field; nature is more than 
science, humanity more than society. If the individual 
cannot exist, in the Nature of science, if he cannot 
express himself in the Humanity of social thinking, it 
does not follow that he is homeless, worldless ; for the 
trans-scientific conception of the world and the trans- 
social estimate of man may still be able to evince the 
august fact that the world does exist for the self. 

There must be a new heavens and a new earth, a 
renewed and advanced conception of the natural order 
which environs us, of the social order which we have 
built in strange neglect of the fact that it was meant 
for humanity. When individualism assumes the respon- 
sibilities of restating the essential meaning of a world 



INTRODUCTION 13 

whose forms have been so dominated by scientism that 
life has become all but impossible, it will find that the 
intellectual life of man is capable of furnishing such 
a view as shall evince the truth of life as such; when 
this individualism attempts to align a new ideal of 
human work, it will find that humanity is worthy of 
something superior to the social. Then, the individual 
may be said to live within, to work from within, while 
the content and character of the self will possess attri- 
butes free from the distressing features of Decadence. 
The determination of the inner life of the individual, 
which was so empty and resultless with Rationalism, so 
vicious and forbidding with Romanticism, will appear 
with greater clearness, with increased value. That which 
individualism is really required to show is that life has 
both truth and worth. When the problem of life-truth 
is taken up, it will appear that it is in culture, rather 
than in aestheticism, that the true inwardness of the 
individual's life is to be found; and when the question 
of life-worth is isolated, it should be apparent that it is 
in work that the ego may best express its inner nature. 
Furthermore, individualism may expect to be cheered 
by the truth that the world, when surveyed in a trans- 
scientific manner, does not forbid culture ; that human- 
ity, when emancipated from the domination of the sec- 
ular social ideal, makes it possible and desirable for 
the individual to do that which may justly be called 
his own work. But these desired truths and ideals 
cannot be appropriated gratuitously; to advance them 
with sincerity and confidence, we must first bring our- 
selves to the realization of the inferiorities of the scien- 
tifico-social and the superiorities of the cultural and 
individualistic. Then perhaps the crass objectivity of 
the one and the strident subjectivity of the other, which 
now lead to an annoying dualism, may give way before 
the higher synthesis of the individual with nature and 
humanity. 



BOOK ONE 
THE GROUND OF LIFE IN NATURE 



BOOK ONE 
THE GROUND OF LIFE IN NATURE 

THUS far in the history of humanity there has 
never been any mutual understanding between 
the mind and the world. With both antiquity 
and mediaevalism, where the world had not been sub- 
jected to the analysis of physical science and where 
the mind had not been treated psychologically, there 
was no apparent need for the adjustment of the feeble 
Inner with the indefinite Outer. In modern thought, 
both mind and world have been so emphasized and so 
thoroughly intensified that mutual adjustment has be- 
come necessary. If the Enlightenment did not always 
say, " There is no world," it did persist in making the 
mind too great; if Positivism has not always asserted, 
" There is no mind," it has been guilty of making the 
world too great. In the midst of these contrasted 
views, individualism has suffered from the exaggera- 
tion of the mind here and the world there; whence 
the present need of mutual adjustment. In the earlier 
period of modern thought, it was the habit of the 
thinker to indulge in a naive self-consciousness which 
caused the ego to lose sight of the world; in the later 
period, in whose midst we are still enveloped, individ- 
ualism found it expedient to exchange self-conscious- 
ness for self-assertion. Then, the ego was a mere " I 
think " ; now, egoism is based upon a vigorous " I will." 
At first, the world was a system of ideas over which 
the thinking self was able to gain ascendancy; finally 
the world became an order of things which has caused 
the ego to come into being as something asserted with 
all the violence of irrationalism. When rationalism 
was in complete possession of the world, it failed to 



18 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

appreciate its good fortune; now that such rationalism 
has passed away, the egoist is forced to avail himself 
of irrationalism in order to assert selfhood in oppo- 
sition to scientism. 

The scientism which now attempts to interpret the 
world for man had its beginning with the inception of 
modern thought; but it was not until the science of the 
organic world advanced beyond the study of the inor- 
ganic that scientism gained the upper hand and drove 
the self from the world of things. How such scientism 
arose and how it achieved its victory over the self, 
must now become the subject of analytical investiga- 
tion, in the course of which two tendencies of modern 
thought, the introvertive and the extrovertive, will 
come in for sharp contrast. The topics proposed by 
the problem at hand are twofold: (i) The Natural- 
isation of Life, and (2) The Struggle for Selfhood. 



PART ONE 
THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 

THE actual naturalization of man's spiritual life, 
implicit in the very genius of modern thought 
as this may have been, was not made apparent 
until the modern witnessed the abrupt transmutation of 
mind and world. Where, at first, thought had made 
itself the end and aim of all intellectual activity, there 
came a time when that thought was but the means to 
an end wholly different from itself; from having been 
master, thought became servant. If, with all its noble 
work, the mind of the individual had been recognized, 
the philosophic situation to-day would not be so trying; 
unfortunately for its own aspirations, the human mind 
has been buried beneath the mass of materials that it 
has itself brought to the light; the commander has 
been lost to view in the confusion dominant among his 
hosts. What madness led the ego to expel itself from 
the world; what disease changed its strength to weak- 
ness? The thought has repudiated the thinker; the 
deed has spurned the doer. At a period when the mind 
has displayed its inherent powers, we are confronted 
by the spectacle of a mental world minus the mind 
which produced it. As a result, the mind is in a world 
like a mouse in a mansion, for the great transmutation 
of mind and world has brought about the expulsion of 
the ego. 

I. THE TRANSMUTATION OF MIND AND 
WORLD 

In modern philosophy, it has been the fate of human 
thinking to undergo a grand transformation, the change 



20 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

from thought to thing. While it is obvious that the 
human self exists within the world which it perceives, 
there to enjoy at least some kind and degree of inner 
life, the career of thought has been such as to place 
the self in such a superior position as to render it a 
fronte, then to shift it to the inferior place of a tergo. 
Expressed most directly, modern thought first placed 
consciousness above the cosmos, only to reduce the 
conscious to the cosmic; whence it was asserted at 
first, " The mind thinks," while now it is simply said, 
" Things exist." In the earlier period of modernity, it 
was the existence of the world which was doubted; 
now, it is the existence of the self that is called in 
question. In our orthodox thinking to-day, there is no 
system of either physics or psychology which has the 
will to assert the existence of the human ego. As a 
result, the assertion of the self as the bearer of man's 
spiritual life has been confined to aesthetic thought, 
where the method of individualistic self-assertion has 
been by means of irrationalism. 

If the thought of the age were given up to none but 
physical speculation, this unhappy tendency to banish 
the human ego might easily be understood; but the age 
has excelled in both the physical and the psychological, 
although neither tendency has been willing or able to 
assist the self in its attempt at self-affirmation. Of 
what value for the self has modern psychology been? 
The Enlightenment, with meagre psychological equip- 
ment, was able to identify the self in the midst of a 
world all-too-physical; but the present age of intro- 
spection has discovered shadow instead of substance, 
the adjective instead of the noun. Our psychology has 
discovered everything but the self; and just now it 
seems as though the search for the personal poles of 
life were to be abandoned. In the study of processes, 
in the midst of quantitative analysis, and in the enthu- 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 21 

siasm for the " stream of consciousness," the meaning 
of our soul-states has been lost to view. James' long, 
long chapter on " The Consciousness of Self " x is 
about the best example of what modern psychology has 
done for the ego ; at the same time, it is brilliant, inter- 
esting, and suggestive. But, from the standpoint of 
positive individualism, this attempt at a contribution 
to the literature of the subject is practically valueless; 
in comparison with an aphorism from Friedrich Schlegel 
or a sharp sentence from Stirner, with a fragment of 
Ibsen's dialogue or a line from Wagner, it is nothing 
at all. In style artistic, in method irrationalistic, the 
psychologist was unable to turn his psychology in the 
direction of the individualistic problem. As in the case 
of James, so elsewhere; all psychology is democratic 
to the extremes of the commonplace and conventional. 

1. The Seee as Thinker 

The fruits of the Enlightenment are now all but lost 
to us in our age of scientism. After the transmutation 
of mind and world, we have awakened to the sombre 
fact that, whereas once the self was in the saddle riding 
the world, now the world has taken its place on the 
shoulders of the modern Atlas. Then, in the days of 
rationalism, the world stood in an apologetic attitude, 
and it was only by courtesy of the thinking self that 
the world was allowed to have an existence of its own. 
Now, it is the self which is on the defensive, and it 
is only the irrationalist and artist who has the will to 
assert that the world contains an " I think " and an 
" I will." The proud thinkers of the earlier period, 
so secure of their own existence, spent much of their 
precious time and effort in the lofty attempt to show 
that the exterior world has an existence which can 

1 Psychology, Ch. X. 



22 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

compare with the existence of the self within. Then, 
it was the fashion for the epistemological and ethical 
thinker, after having satisfied himself with due measure 
of solipsism and egoism, to exercise a little concern 
for the exterior order, as if to suggest that the world 
also might have some claim upon existence in general. 
Nor was the ego satisfied with purely interior existence, 
so that the most characteristic efforts of the Enlighten- 
ment were only so many strivings after the physical 
and social. To-day, the individualist realizes that all 
attempts to arrive at the physical and social are equiv- 
alent to carrying coals to Newcastle. 

From Descartes to Kant, the Enlightenment basked 
in the cool, rational rays of the midnight sun; at the 
present moment, individualism gropes about in the dark- 
ness of irrationalism. With the enfeeblement of the 
understanding, we are now at a loss to comprehend how 
Descartes could have made the self the centre of all 
existence; still less are we able to sympathize with 
Cartesianism when it rejoiced in the manifest solipsism 
which such an " I think " involved. How mighty must 
have been the Cartesian cogito when, after having estab- 
lished the self, it proceeded to prove the existence of 
both God and the world ! In evincing the idea of Deity, 
Descartes was not content to assert that it is the idea 
of God in intellectu that leads one to assert God in re; 
for the modern thinker is so anthropic as to suggest 
that it is the idea of God in us that forms the basis of 
theistic belief. At the same time, this enraptured egoist 
comes to his conclusion concerning the existence of the 
exterior world by the specially human plea that God 
would not deceive man when man seems to perceive 
something like an exterior world. Egoism and human- 
ism thus constitute the standpoint of the Cartesian sys- 
tem, and yet the net result for an individualistic doc- 
trine of life was comparatively small. The existence 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 23 

of the egoistic or solipsistic school of Cartesians, which 
is hardly more than hinted at by Reid, 2 might be taken 
to indicate that the Enlightenment was contritely indi- 
vidualistic; but the complete evaporation of the doc- 
trine convinces us that the seventeenth century did not 
appreciate its own unique ideas. No, it was the exist- 
ence of the all-obvious exterior world which caused 
them uneasiness ; and they were glad enough to see that 
world enter the kingdom of existence as a camel pass- 
ing through the eye of a thought-needle. In contem- 
porary thought, it is the thinking self that must struggle 
to assert its existence. 

The spirit of humanism militant, as this appears in 
the philosophy of Cartesianism, came forth as human- 
ism triumphant in the French classicism of Pascal and 
Corneille. In an age like our own, where one is unable 
to distinguish between truth and error, good and bad, 
and where he is in doubt concerning the truth and 
worth of the human soul, it is refreshing to recall the 
victorious humanity as this is found in the philosophy 
of Pascal and the poetry of Corneille. The present age 
feels the " shame of thinking and the horror of being 
a man " ; but it was the direct reverse of such senti- 
ments which inspired the thought and art of these 
Cartesians, while the realistic temptation to consider 
man as a creature of finitude was one which they did 
not think to consider. In the case of Pascal, individ- 
ualism finds an analogy to the thought of the day; 
" Pascal," says Morice, " is a poet of the hour which 
is now striking, of the synthetic period." 3 With 
Nietzsche, we find an inverted Pascal, while in Ernest 
Hello the positive picture of the elder master comes to 
the light in the interesting analogy of the seventeenth 
and nineteenth centuries. That which makes Pascal 

2 Inquiry into the Human Mind, 1854, 269, note. 

3 La Litterature de Tout a L'Heure, 108. 



24 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of importance to individualism, even where he like 
Geulincx condemned egoism as hateful, lies in the fact 
that, in a scientific age, Pascal knew how to affirm the 
independent existence of the thinking soul : observing 
how weak was this soul when contrasted with the ex- 
terior forces of the world, Pascal thought to com- 
pensate for this by attributing to the soul the single 
and superior quality of thought, whence man became 
for him " the reed that thinks." The unwillingness of 
Pascal to identify the soul with the self was only 
another example of the colorless individualism of the 
Enlightenment. 

With Corneille, whose faith in the formal power of 
the mind reveals itself in the absolute formalism and 
unity of his drama, the supremacy of humanism appears 
in the heroism of the characters of the drama. Theol- 
ogy was still insisting upon the idea of God; science 
had elevated to the same height the idea of the world; 
Corneille insisted upon placing upon a third peak the 
idea of man. The superiority of this poet lies in the 
comprehensiveness and consistency of his art. Wagner 
did not fail to elevate man; Ibsen had enough power 
of belief to exalt a militant humanism; but, where our 
modern masters have had to degrade science and spirit- 
uality in order to save humanity, Corneille found it 
possible to keep the world, the Deity, and the human 
soul upon the same superior level. With such char- 
acters as the Cid and Horace, individualism perceives 
with what grandeur a poet can conceive of the suprem- 
acy of mankind; the Stoical indifference of man to the 
world and the direct relation of the soul to God con- 
spire to raise the individual to an extraordinary height, 
whence anything "natural," or anything suggestive of 
finite weakness becomes an impossible sentiment. The 
Cartesian philosophy, which had made man soul alone, 
the beast body alone, here works to permit the absolute 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 25 

perfection of the soul through reason. If these egos 
were artistic exaggerations, they can only persuade us 
that our own age has been indulging in the exaggeration 
of the impersonal, whence the ego of aestheticism, 
immoralism, and irreligion, has had to come forth to 
confute the stolid naturalistic argument against the 
truth and worth of human life. In the case of Rous- 
seau, the assertion of the self becomes somewhat the 
same problem that it is to-day: both naturalistic and 
humanistic, Rousseau can find no inward satisfaction 
in a physico-political arrangement that denies to the 
self the right to exist within and to express itself from 
within ; whence his resort to romantic idealism. 

2. The; Empirical Ego 

Lest it be imagined that it was the rationalistic tend- 
ency in the Enlightenment that inclined to exalt the ego 
above the world, while the empirical method remained 
true to the objective order, it must be recalled that 
empiricism was none the less able to withstand the 
tendency toward subjectivity. With Hobbes, this indi- 
viduating was confined to the ethical; for the material- 
ism of this writer did not permit him to advance to 
the place where he could render a decision as to objec- 
tivity and subjectivity. With Locke, however, the case 
was different, so that his empiricism was constantly 
threatened with egoism. In vain does Locke strive to 
persuade himself that the mind is a tabula rasa whose 
knowledge of the world, instead of being its own inner 
work, is dependent upon the impressions received from 
without. In opposing the rationalism of Descartes, 
Locke premised a conception of mind not wholly unlike 
that which had been the source of the Cartesian philo- 
sophy; in both systems, the inner, subjective principle 
is without content, and where in the one case it is a 



26 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

mere " I think," in the other it is the non-committal 
tabula rasa. Both conceptions of mind are formal; 
both tend to show that knowledge is a knowledge of 
ideas rather than of things. In Locke's empiricism, 
this subjectivity comes to the surface in the distinction 
between " primary and secondary qualities," those that 
belong to the thing as such and those that are the 
property of the mind. With an empiricist, we should 
expect to find the assertion that the mind, which seems 
to owe its knowledge to the world of things, has a 
knowledge of their qualities; instead of this, we are 
informed that knowledge is confined to the secondary, 
subjective qualities, as a result of which knowledge is 
a knowledge of ideas. Hence, the mind is thrown back 
upon itself, while the system of empiricism furthers the 
humanism and egoism which sprang from the rational- 
istic principles of Cartesianism. 

In the philosophy of Berkeley, this subjectivism 
reaches its climax; so that, where rationalism had ended 
in a willed solipsism, empiricism was driven to the same 
conclusion. In Hume, who took up Locke's problem 
of causality where Berkeley had confined his attention 
to that of substance, the same humanism is apparent. 
Like Descartes, Hume was a skeptic; only the skep- 
ticism of the empiricist was the postulate, where, with 
the rationalist, it had been the premise. An empiricism 
which deals with things rather than with thoughts, 
might be expected to reveal the connection between 
those things, but no such knowledge is forthcoming 
from Hume; instead of real, physical knowledge, we 
are forced to accept purely humanistic feelings, whose 
sway over us is expressed in the famous maxim of 
Hume, " Custom, then, is the great guide of human 
life." Berkeley's treatment of the substance-problem 
was solipsistic where Hume's attitude toward causality 
gave him a humanistic view-point. Berkeley's minor 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 27 

idealism, founded as it was upon the percept rather 
than the concept, does not fail to bring the self into 
the foreground ; for the perceiving being is the " mind," 
the " myself." 4 The Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum be- 
comes Percipio, ergo sum. Berkeley's empirical inter- 
ests are shown in the fact that he is anxious to explain 
the existence of the exterior world, where Descartes 
was primarily interested in assuring himself of the 
soul's existence; so that the solipsism of the former 
is an unwitting conclusion where that of the latter had 
been frank and conscious. Moreover, Berkeley fails 
to come out clearly in favor of the self, partly because 
he stood in dread of materialism, partly because his 
philosophic was devoted to Theism. Descartes had 
started out free of both these notions; but Berkeley 
was prejudiced against the materialistic hypothesis of 
English thought, while he was equally prejudiced in 
favor of the Theistic postulate in English life. Thus, 
we find him endeavoring to place the idea of God in 
the stead of the idea of matter; and his opposition to 
abstractions, which places him in the surprising posi- 
tion of nominalism, is to be explained in the light of 
the fact that he was nominalistic toward the notion of 
material substance, 5 while his attitude toward the idea 
of spiritual substance was thoroughly realistic. Now 
these strained attitudes toward matter and spirit tended 
to carry him away from the egoistic implication of his 
system, even where they do not forbid the solipsistic 
conclusion to his whole system of knowledge. Berke- 
ley's idealism was thus calculated to exalt the ego in 
the same way that Descartes' had done; and it is the 
egoistic conclusion that the history of philosophy has 
drawn from his philosophy. 

The aesthetic thought of England did not fail to 

4 Principles, § 3. 

5 lb., § 9. 



28 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

exalt the moral man in the way that French art had 
elevated the rational man. Even where there was 
always a strong utilitarian tendency, the supremacy of 
man did not want for expression; for the utilitarian 
was almost as much of a rational calculator as the 
rationalistic moralist. Of what introspective powers 
must Smith's moral man have been possessed, and with 
what faculties of reasoning was Bentham's ethical sub- 
ject endowed to have perfected a moral life out of the 
materials afforded by the senses ! Man is ever in con- 
trol; his reason has the last word. Pope's Essay on 
Man, with its subtle mixture of hedonism and rigor- 
ism, is the classic expression of this humanistic tend- 
ency. As the mind of the philosopher busies itself with 
its ideas, the mind of the poet makes a study of man. 
Sundered from the world and ensconced as the sov- 
ereign of creation, Pope's "Man" rejoices in a moral 
sense which is " a god within the mind," while " self- 
love thus pushed to social and divine " becomes so 
extensive as to embrace the whole external world of 
spirits. Thus does the wise, moral, and practical man 
possess an egoistic principle capable of adjusting him 
to life in its totality. In an age like ours, where man as 
individual must wait for nature to dictate his impulses 
while he further looks to society to direct these for 
him, such confident egoism is likely to be forgotten. 

When the epistemology of the Enlightenment makes 
use of such expressions as, " human mind," " human 
understanding," and the like, one is likely to question 
whether the thought of that age was indeed aware of 
the humanity which rightly attaches itself to man's 
mind, just as one may be led to inquire whether those 
who to-day lay such emphasis upon " humanism " are 
equally aware of the fact that man as man is rational. 
Knowledge is a peculiar synthesis of the human and the 
rational; and the employment of the understanding is 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 29 

one of the means by which man comes to the inner 
realization of his inherent humanity. Instead of being 
a purely formal affair, in connection with which the 
mind is content to receive facts and relations from the 
exterior order, thought has ever shown itself to be em- 
inently creative. The creativeness of the mind, when 
it has been recognized, has usually been viewed in such 
a manner as to make man the creator of the knowable 
world, although it seems as though man were making 
use of the knowing process for the sake of establishing 
himself in the world where he has his being. The 
understanding must thus be esteemed as something 
affirmative rather than purely receptive, even when the 
understanding can perhaps do no more than elaborate 
the affirmation of the self. It is in the idea of an 
inward affirmation that the work of the mind is most 
clearly understood, and it is just this sense of mental 
self-assertion which tends to become obscured in the 
midst of imitative, scientific thought. Epistemology 
becomes plausible only as it makes mind something 
extra-mental. 

The sovereignty of the mind over the world receives 
its most complete and convincing expression in Kant, 
even where this thinker first limits the sway of mind 
to the phenomenal order, and then delivers it in its 
crippled condition to the moral will. From within out- 
wards, that is the leading motive of the Critique of 
Pure Reason. The world of sense is easily overcome 
and its forms of time and space delivered to the mind 
when Kant idealizes the spatial and the temporal. And 
not only the immediate world of sense perception, but 
the more remote and vigorous order of physics is 
treated in the same lordly fashion. The static and 
mathematical world under his control in the intuitions 
of time and space, Kant proceeds to exercise the same 
lordship over the dynamic, physical system. The centre 



3 o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of the physical world is placed at the self, " the syn- 
thetic unity of apperception." 6 From this humanistic 
centre radiate the twelve possibilities of thought, the 
categories. These are not drawn empirically from the 
world, but are deduced from the mind to be imposed 
upon the world. As long as the mind is willing to 
confine its lordship to the limits of " a possible experi- 
ence," it is so placed that it may indicate all the possi- 
bilities of physical science, which come forth in a duo- 
decimal system in exact conformity with the self-suffi- 
cient categories. Quantitative and qualitative analyses, 
as also the principles of causality and substance, assume 
the superior rationalistic character of " Axioms of In- 
tuition " and " Anticipation of Perceptions," " Analo- 
gies of Experience " and " Postulates of Empirical 
Thought in General." Never since the dawn of Cre- 
ation, if indeed then, has the material world been so 
thoroughly at the mercy of mind. The climax of this 
humanistic style of thinking comes when Kant calmly 
says, " It is the understanding which gives law unto 
nature." 7 It is of course true that Kant confines the 
mind to its own world, which is a phenomenal one; 
but, when he draws a circle about the human under- 
standing, it is not with the aim of allowing the world 
to express its own existence in connection with the 
metaphysical ideas of soul, world, and God, topics be- 
yond the power of thought to handle, but with the aim 
and result of showing how these transcendent principles 
are under the domination of the human will. For, 
where human understanding dictates to the physical 
world, the human will is equally rigorous with the 
metaphysical or noumenal order; in one department, 
man rules the world, and gives laws to it by means 
of the category of causality; in the other, he domineers 

9 Op. cit., tr. Miiller, 87 et seq. 
7 Prolegomena, § 36. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 31 

over it through the Categorical Imperative. Nothing 
is independent of man, whose " synthetic unity of 
apperception " and ethical " autonomy " have the world- 
whole well in hand. 

While Kant was meditating upon his conquest over 
the world of philosophy, the aesthetics of Winckelmann 
and Lessing was enjoying that serene sense of world- 
mastery which the proud author of the Critique was 
awaiting. As yet, the Romantic striving in which the 
German mind sought to free itself from an entangling 
world of principles and customs had not been felt. 
Classicism was dreaming the dream of beauty, conscious 
only of the mind's power to control the world of forms. 
This calm conceptualism, with its lack of life and con- 
tent, was expressed in Winckelmann's art-ideals, with 
their sense of stillness and nobility. The simplicity of 
classic beauty appealed to Winckelmann as rare wine 
drunk from a transparent goblet, s while its rare essence 
was further compared to a spirit drawn from the ma- 
terial order as by fire. 9 " Nach diesem Begriff soil die 
Schonheit sein, wie das vollkommenste Wasser, welches 
je weniger Geschmack es hat, destogesunder geachtet 
wird, zveil es von fremden Theilen gel'dutert wird." 10 

With the dawning of nineteenth-century thought, it 
is most difficult to understand how the individualistic 
forces at work in both metaphysics anoT morality should 
have come to the end of their reign. Man awoke from 
his' bright dream of lordship over the physical and 
social worlds to find himself fettered. As if in a 
twinkling, like the political changes which took place 
in the French Revolution, the aristocracy of the indi- 
vidual intellect gave way to a physical and social 
democracy of dialectic. This instantaneous transmu- 

3 WerJce, lib. 4, Cap. 2, § 19. 
9 lb., § 22. 
M J&., § 23. 



32 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

tation, which had the effect of subordinating the ego, 
the world of nature, and society, seems to have been 
due to twin causes. In the first place, the individual, 
who had come into being so easily in the logic of 
Descartes and the ethics of Hobbes, was always taken 
for granted, was never forced to exist by means of 
the will-to-selfhood. Thus it was only a naive ego 
whose sway over the world was a matter of circum- 
stance rather than of conscious aim. In the second 
place, the ego which, for the time, held the secret of the 
physical and social worlds, was ever bent upon going 
forth from itself to the objective order. Solipsism and 
egoism were not really acceptable to the age that had 
evoked them. It was the objective order, not the sub- 
jective one, which was the goal of that period, so that 
the tendency was a centrifugal one, which led both 
metaphysics and morality to depart from the inner 
principle which thought had so rapidly achieved. The 
activity which might have been expended in elaborating 
the ego and organizing its inner life, left the ego to 
itself, and set about developing the physical and the 
social. Something of this was to be expected, since 
the Enlightenment was not monastic in tone; but it 
can only be regretted that such undue prominence was 
attached to the value of obtaining an exterior order 
in its scientific and social forms. 

As early as Kant, the oppression from without had 
begun to be felt. The Critical Philosophy had used 
the a priori powers of the understanding to encircle 
the self with the phenomenal order; only within this 
finely empirical field was the mind able to rejoice in 
its powers. The ego, which was never really recog- 
nized by Kant, became the ruler of a petty principality. 
On the ethical side, the expression of the free ego was 
no more complete than its intellectual activity had been. 
As soon as Kant had educed the freedom of the will, 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 33 

and placed it as the ruler of the noumenal order, he 
limited its activities to the moralistic work of fulfilling 
the demands of the Categorical Imperative, so that the 
self was as a prisoner in its own castle. The Kantian 
aesthetics, which tended to deliver the mind from the 
logical concept and the moral law, did indeed represent 
the possibilities of the inner life, where intuition and 
taste were supreme; hence we may attribute a goodly 
measure of the Romantic revolt which was to follow, 
to no other influence than the sense of freedom and 
feeling of creativeness which this aesthetic engendered. 
Yet, in all three phases of Transcendentalism, the sense 
of inner life and the buoyancy of the human will show 
themselves to have been infected with a touch of low- 
spiritedness. 

II. THE ACTUAL NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 

The modern movement toward the naturalization of 
human life was something more than a theoretical atti- 
tude; it was an attempt on the part of man to live his 
life in the world as such. With both classicism and 
Christianity, the immediate relation of man to nature 
had been negated, even when, as a matter of fact, the 
imperfect conditions of civilization had made that 
relation a most essential one. With the modern, when 
for the first time man begins to separate his life from 
the world, the spirit of paradox worked in such a 
manner as to make the life of immediacy seem desir- 
able. Not only admitting that man was a creature of 
earth, modern thought seemed to take pleasure in the 
thought; whence it set up the ideal of immediate human 
realization by means of a system of utility. In the case 
of the earlier forms of life which had characterized the 
culture of the western world, there was a desire to 
consider man in such a humanistic capacity as to make 



34 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



the obvious relation to the exterior world appear inci- 
dental. With the Pagan, it was the spirit of art which 
was evoked to humanize man; while with the Christian, 
it was religion which was expected to redeem man from 
the world. Now, the modern has set up the natural- 
istic in contrast to the aesthetical and religious. 

i. The; Surrender to Naturalism 

The relation of man to the world, as expressed by 
the spirit of classicism, may be understood when it is 
recalled how ancient thought, aware of man's terres- 
trial character and vocation, sought to ameliorate the 
situation by perfecting the world in which man was 
called upon to live. In this manner, the typical Grecian 
spirit was that of Apollonian culture, whereby man 
sought to supplant the raw and barbaric by the fine 
and intellectual. To place knowledge at the summit 
of all human activity and to curb the will by the ideal 
restraint of moderation, was to attempt the realization 
of the humanistic in man. It was from this type of 
Grecian, Apollonian culture that humanism as a doc- 
trine of man's intellectual and aesthetical perfection 
arose. If, as Nietzsche has claimed, 11 the Greek was 
not loath to introduce at times the converse spirit of 
the Dionysian with its titanic and barbaric tendencies, 
it may be said that history had taught him how superior 
in character and force was the Apollonian spirit, so that 
nothing could be feared from an occasional Dionysian 
outburst, which could have only the effect of refreshing 
and reinvigorating the more formal intellect. 

The formal spirit of antique culture is easily recog- 
nized in art, where the plastic ideal of the static and 
typical, rather than the dynamic notion of character 
and motion, was the supreme consideration. In its 

11 The Birth of Tragedy, in loc. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 35 

dialectics, antiquity knew only the poles of reality, as 
these were found in appearance and reality; of the 
medium world of activity and volition, the ancient 
mind was nobly ignorant, so that its supreme desire 
was to know the mind, while its highest energy was 
the " energy of contemplation." For this reason, the 
activity of the ancient mind was of the artistic rather 
than of the practical order, and it was impossible for 
the ancient to entertain the idea of work. The attitude 
of the classic mind toward nature was one in which the 
will sought the perfection of the natural order, and it 
was without difficulty that the aesthetic consciousness 
of the classic thinker gave its impress to the external 
world of appearances. In art, this was done when the 
principle of form, as this was observed in the human 
body, was brought to perfection; in philosophy, the 
same end was accomplished when the synoptic activity 
of reason reduced all scattered particulars to formal 
unity. In all its work, the ancient mind sought that 
completion of the exterior order which should make it 
possible and reasonable for man to assume his place in 
the outer world. 

In contrast to ancient aestheticism, mediaeval pietism 
sought the perfection of the inner life as such, apart 
from any relation to the outer world. Where the first 
manner of European culture had been marked by beauty, 
the second laid its emphasis upon truth ; where the mind 
had first sought the subjugation of sense, it now turned 
to the development of spiritual life, and an aesthetic 
classicism gave way to religious romanticism. Thus, it 
was no longer the world as contemplated according to 
the formal ideals of the mind, but the spirit, inwardly 
liberated so that it was enabled to press onward, out- 
ward toward a Beyond. The absence of such a Beyond, 
hardly felt by a classicism which found so much of 
beauty and nobility in the immediate world, has become 



36 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

a more painful want in our modern life, which feels 
that it has lost much of that which the mediaeval 
period had achieved for itself. The ancient was in a 
position where he could be one with nature, but the 
ideals of mediaevalism were such that nothing in the 
immediate order of sense was able to explain the felt 
meaning of the inner life, or content the aspirations of 
the romantic will. In mediaevalism, the forms of Pla- 
tonic and Aristotelian idealism may have prevailed, but 
the inward meaning of them was due to the creative 
spirit of the pietistic mind. 

The special methods of mediaevalism, by means of 
which it attempted the transcendence of nature, appear 
in both philosophy and art, where a common roman- 
ticism obtained. This method was twofold: here, it 
showed itself in the desire to descend beneath the sur- 
face of consciousness, and thus discover the essential 
soul of man; there, it displayed itself in the longing to 
transcend the world, and find the realm of free spiritual 
life. Of these dual motives, Augustine and Anselm 
may be taken as representative. In the Augustinian 
theology, nothing was more significant than the intro- 
spective plunge into the depths of consciousness, whence 
the conscious certainty of inner, personal existence be- 
came a fact; in contrast with the self-knowledge of 
Augustine, the know-thyself of Socrates appears quite 
feeble. The completion of this style of spiritual rea- 
soning appears in Anselm, who endeavors to postulate 
objectively that which Augustine had laid down as a 
fundamental principle of subjectivity; Anselm thus 
seeks the outward realization of the inner spiritual 
principle, when he takes the things which are true 
within for the intellect and strives to make them true 
without in the person of the Deity, the outer realization 
of the inward act of intellection. It is undeniable that 
the method of mediaevalism made no room for the 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 37 

knowledge of things, so important in modern philo- 
sophy; but our modern knowledge of things has been 
equally neglectful of the knowledge of spiritual matters. 

Modern life had naturalized itself in conscientious 
manner by turning away from the results of the inner 
life, as these were inherited from mediaevalism, and 
directing its attention toward the things of nature. In 
this obj edification of the mind, modernism was as far 
from the classic as from the romantic ideal. Thus, it 
was neither the perfection of the outer nor the per- 
fection of the inner, but the direct knowledge of world 
and man, as the cosmic and anthropic data were given 
in experience. In a certain sense, which followed im- 
plicitly would be misleading, the modern has pursued 
his naturalism in the spirit of disinterestedness: where 
the ancient looked to the world to express the meaning 
of his ideals, where the mediaeval pursued his spiritual 
aims in neglect of the facts of outer experience, the 
modern has felt free to indulge in no such freedom; 
whence he has studied man and the world for the sake 
of those humanistic and naturalistic facts which were 
presented by experience, and that with a resolute dis- 
regard of the ultimate interests of his being. In thus 
disclaiming both mental and moral responsibility, in 
abjuring questions concerning the truth and worth of 
his own life, the modern has placed his affair upon 
nature, heedless of what the results might be. 

In this surrender to naturalism, the modern has not 
been blind to the question of human interest; the dis- 
interestedness which inspired him must thus be under- 
stood in a restricted sense, for the modern was willing 
to relinquish the remote values of his existence, as 
these appeared in art and religion, only as he was able 
to realize those immediate interests which naturalism 
itself seemed calculated to further and fructify. For 
this reason, we are called upon to observe that it has 



3 8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

been the actual desire to live a naturalized life, eman- 
cipated from the aesthetical and religious, which has 
co-operated with the theoretical naturalization of our 
modern intellectual life. Ancient aestheticism did not 
float freely in the air of artistic and dialectical specu- 
lation, but exerted itself as the expression of the actual 
life of a people which believed and lived in the artistic. 
Mediaeval romanticism in religion was elaborated in the 
free, but came forth in response to those pietistic ideals 
which were actual felt in the heart of the thinker. In 
the same manner, it may be said that our modern nat- 
uralism, instead of arising in a spirit of complete dis- 
interestedness, which has been the alleged glory of 
science, has proceeded hand in hand with the direct 
interests of an age which has been persuaded that 
nature was able to satisfy the wants of the human 
heart. If the principles of modern science had not 
been calculated to found and enhance the industrial 
ideal, would modern physics, chemistry, and biology 
have been so assiduously cultivated? 

The position to which our thought thus drives us 
may be expressed by asserting that it is interest which 
guides the intellect; this proposition can do no harm, 
if we are careful to write the word " interest " so large 
that it shall not suffer itself to be confined to any one 
phase of human existence. The mind of man could 
not tolerate a system of thought which should assert 
that knowledge exists for the sake of revealing that 
which is beautifully good in the world, or for the sake 
of that which is truly good in the inner life of human- 
ity; can it be any more indulgent with a naturalistic 
system which declares that knowledge is to be pursued 
with the" aim of bringing to the light those facts and 
relations which have direct bearing upon the immediate 
life of man in nature? Ibsen's Julian, who felt un- 
happy in the " age of iron," turned away with reluctance 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 39 

from Paganism and Christianity exclaiming, " The old 
beauty is no longer beautiful; the new truth is no longer 
true." 12 May we not assume then, that, with the change 
of interest from the industrial, as this cannot fail to 
come in time, the newer truth of scientism will no longer 
be true? 

" We live in a scientific age." How thoroughly has 
this phrase eaten its way into the heart of the modern 
man ! We live in an age where we no longer desire 
to perfect the exterior world through art, where we 
are no longer anxious to elevate the soul above nature, 
but where we are bent upon getting profit out of ma- 
terial existence. Hence, success and science go hand 
in hand, while older and worthier syntheses are dis- 
carded for this newer one, which has promised to be 
more satisfactory. At the beginning of the modern 
period, in the days of Bacon, man made a covenant 
with the world, the terms of which were such that, in 
exchange for spiritual goods, the world was to give 
material benefits, which should have the advantage of 
being perceptible to the senses and accessible to the 
will. Now we are in condition where we are asking 
whether nature has fulfilled her contract, whether the 
physical order has kept its promise. As a life ideal, 
" success " cannot be said to express any fundamental 
need of the human soul; but, under the mask of suc- 
cess, the permanent principle of human happiness was 
seeking expression. With the promises of the physical 
world, promises which included the satisfaction of the 
inquiring intellect and the striving will, man undertook 
the complete naturalization of his spiritual existence; 
so that now, with the glamor of naturalism passing 
away, we are forced to ask whether nature has yielded 
the harvest that man had expected to gather. When 
man seeks the truth and worth of life, the consolation 

12 Caesar's Apostasy, Act. II. 



4 o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of both intellect and will, he cannot avoid the suspicion 
that the naturalization of his life was too great a price 
for the benefits which up to the present hour he has 
received. It is for this reason that individualism calls 
upon us to come to an understanding with life, in order 
that we decide whether modern life is not in vain. In 
some quarters, where realistic thought prevails, escape 
from the trying situation has been effected by the simple 
device of taking things as they are; in others, where 
man is idealistic, deliverance from despair has assumed 
the form of dilettantism; yet, these artifices cannot rep- 
resent the ultimate attitude of the human mind, which 
must desire to behold the union of interior life and 
exterior existence. Thus, it becomes the duty of indi- 
vidualism to analyze the modern situation, in order that 
the seriousness of our condition may be appreciated 
and understood. At this point, then, we are forced to 
inquire what naturalism has really meant in human life, 
just as we are expected to consider how individualism 
has made its war upon it. Only as the outer condition 
and the inner need are comprehended may we hope to 
arrive at the principles of a higher synthesis of our 
human ideas and impulses. 

2. The; Ambiguous Elevation op the Physical 

Modern thought, instead of beginning with the poet- 
ical, as ancient culture arose in connection with Homer, 
instead of proceeding upon the basis of religion, as 
mediaevalism streamed forth from the New Testament, 
had its origin in the science of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries. The Renaissance had found it pos- 
sible to view humanity in the light of the aesthetical, 
and had laid down the principles of a humanism in 
which much of the truth and worth of life could be 
found; but the scientific interests of the time, with the 
new earth and new heavens which they involved, in- 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 41 

duced the modern to abandon the intensive character 
of his limited thought for an extensive movement which 
expanded the meaning of human life over a field indefi- 
nitely vast. For this reason, the development of mod- 
ern thought, instead of witnessing the parallel progress 
of the humanistic and naturistic, was conducted exclu- 
sively by the ideals of naturalism. When individualism 
reviews the strivings of this early modern period, it 
observes that the promised and intended naturalism was 
not always forthcoming in actual philosophic perform- 
ance; for the humanistic could not fail to make its 
presence felt, even when it was not recognized as an 
integral factor in modern thought. The elevation of 
the physical world was thus an ambiguous one, since 
the naturalistic could not wholly rid itself of the hu- 
manistic, while other phases of the physical philosophy 
tended to result in a dualism of objective and subjective. 
When, at a later period, the inorganic conception of the 
world gave way to biological ideas, the same entrance 
of the humanistic was observed; for the biological 
served as an introduction to the psychological, whence 
the mind was justified of her children. 

(1) The Naturalistic and Humanistic 

The first, if not the most important, step taken by 
naturalism appears in the new astronomy, as a result 
of which the earth was taken from the center of the 
universe, and relegated to an insignificant position. 
With this astronomical change in point of view, the 
dignity of human life seemed to be in danger; if man's 
physical position was no longer central, his attitude 
toward the world, so it seemed, could hardly be esteemed 
lordly. Up to that time, man had placed his affair 
upon the earth; and, when the planet was degraded, 
man seemed to suffer with it. It may seem strange 



42 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



that mediaevalism, which had assumed to find the sense 
and worth of human life in something interior and 
unique, should thus take to heart a change of view 
which concerned only the material world, and the earth 
at that; but the historical fact remains, for man found 
it difficult to accept in place of his geocentric view the 
new heliocentrism. 

But the astronomical, with its interests devoted to 
the remote precincts of the universe, was not the only 
form of science which seemed to threaten the position 
of man in the universe; the new physics was no less 
militant. The new physics, with its faith in the mathe- 
matical and mechanical, tended to remove from man's 
view that supernaturalism which, though superior to 
him, seemed more akin to his inner nature than any- 
thing which the physical world could present. At the 
same time, the inner nature of man himself seemed to 
suffer from the same fate which had overtaken the 
Deity; the inner nature of man, with its supposedly 
independent states of consciousness and assumedly free 
acts of initiation, was submitted to the same mechanical 
interpretation to which the outer world had been forced 
to succumb. As astronomy had robbed man of his 
heaven, physics robbed him of his earth. The increase 
on the side of the extension of nature was marked by 
a decrease on the side of the intension of human life, 
for, as the world became larger, man became smaller; 
the truth of naturalism was the falsity of the anthropic. 
Under the auspices of naturalism, the world seemed for 
the first time to exist in its forms and to express itself 
in its forces, no longer for the sake of mankind, but 
for its own sake. 

But, in the midst of this celebration of the natural- 
istic as the last word of truth, one must pause to con- 
sider how definitely and logically the thought of the 
seventeenth century was advancing a rival life-ideal, in 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 43 

the form of a theory of human culture. The contrast 
between the two ideals, the natural and the cultural, 
becomes all the more striking when one observes fur- 
ther that it was in the mind of one and the same indi- 
vidual that the rival views had their birth; this was 
the man Bacon. Where one seeks to regard Bacon as 
the modern, par excellence, in that he broke away from 
both antiquity and mediaevalism, one must not over- 
look the fact that Bacon is just as authoritative in the 
humanistic as in the naturistic; for, if he precipitated 
the problem of physical science, he did not fail to pro- 
pose the problem of human culture: the Advancement 
of Learning is a modern work no less than the Novum 
Organum. For himself, Bacon refuses to accept the 
most important of the new naturalistic ideals, as the 
Copernican astronomy and the application of mathe- 
matics to physical problems ; 13 and his system of poli- 
tics makes no room for the principle of jus naturale. 14: 
Yet, in all his alleged modernness, Bacon did not see 
fit to reject the antique ideal of culture, whence he 
made the earliest modern life-ideal the same as the 
latest principle of antique culture, the Aristotelian " en- 
ergy of contemplation." 15 The idea of the world may 
have been clearer than that of man, but the humanistic 
was no less attractive or forceful. 

When, as was the case with antiquity, knowledge 
gave pleasure to and bestowed dignity upon the human 
mind, when, in mediaevalism, knowledge pointed out the 
pathway to spiritual life, knowledge was now regarded 
as that which gives power. This power was naturally, 
not of man as though it were a revelation of his own 
will, but of nature. Bacon expressed this in his con- 
tention for a knowledge of facts, whereby the mind was 

1S Bacon, Nov. Org., lib. II, 5. 

14 Cf. Lerminier, Histoire du Droit, Int., 113. 

36 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, I, VI. 



44 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

exteriorized and rendered alien to itself. From that 
time on, it became the duty of the mind to elaborate 
data, rather than to refine its methods of thinking; to 
educe laws, rather than to produce arguments. The 
day of man had gone; the day of nature come. As a 
result of this new operation, the older syntheses, those 
systems which Comte sought to identify as the theo- 
logical and metaphysical, gave way before endless an- 
alysis, the synoptic unity of which was expressed some- 
what vaguely under the head of " nature." It was in 
this spirit of naturalistic sufficiency that the seventeenth 
century severed connection with all forms of tradition, 
and set up nature as the standard of thought and truth; 
hence arose, religio naturalis and jus naturale. The 
word " naturalist " occurred as early as 1588, in the 
writings of Bodin. 16 It was, of course, the same world 
of perception without and the same thinking mind 
within; but the attitude of the mind toward the world 
and the aim of the mind itself had undergone radical 
change in the light of which modern naturalism arose 
in contrast to the scholastic and classical. 

When individualism is called upon to read the history 
of the early naturalism, which sought to place the world 
in the position which man had been occupying, sought 
to transmute the anthropic into the physical, it does not 
fail to observe that, in spite of the extreme importance 
attached to the idea of nature, the idea of man was 
by no means as insignificant as a superficial view of 
the history might cause one to suppose. It must not 
be assumed that naturalism arose of its own force or 
for its own sake. The career of naturalism was ever 
marked by a decided humanism, so that one might ques- 
tion whether science naturalized the soul or the soul 
humanized science. Individualism is free to admit that 
there was a difference between the anthropomorphic 

13 Lechler, Geschichte d. Eng. Deismus, 31. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 45 

and anthropological conceptions of scholasticism and 
the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance; but, since 
humanism and naturalism arose contemporaneously, it 
is false to assume that the modern view of the world 
drove man as such from that world. Where history 
appears to show that science and its naturalism arose 
in independence of the spiritual needs and inward ideals 
of the human mind, the analysis of the modern move- 
ment convinces us that, in naturalism, it was the same 
humanizing mind which was at work upon the problem 
of the world. 

At its inception, naturalism was urged, not so much 
for the sake of nature itself, but largely on account of 
man who felt the desire to lead a new life. Hemmed 
in by the restrictions of mediaevalism, thwarted by the 
oppressive principles of an ecclesiastical existence, the 
modern movement arose in response to a demand for 
a freer, fuller conception of man's life in the world. 
At heart, the earliest form of scientism was only a 
humanism, while the motive which expressed itself 
according* to the methods of naturalism was a desire 
for the emancipation of mankind. The various forms 
of liberation which took place in connection with the 
new astronomy and the new physics were but symptoms 
of this desire for a new world and a new life. In the 
particular instances of Galileo and Bruno, the new nat- 
uralism showed how humanistic it was, and the names 
of these men have passed into history, not so much as 
scientific investigators, but as heroes of a liberal human- 
ity. As some sought relief from mediaevalism by a 
return to Paganism, others exemplified the same desire 
in their recourse to nature, so that the spirit of the 
times was so humanistic as to bear little resemblance 
to the positivism of the nineteenth century. 

Far from rejoicing in freedom from human interest, 
even when the narrowness of the anthropic view had 



46 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

disappeared, modern science carried out its theories of 
physics in connection with a theory of politics. Both 
nature and man had the opportunity to speak for them- 
selves; the exponents of the new views rejoiced, here 
in a new view of the world, there in an equally new 
view of man. However distressed other views of life, 
the idealistic for example, may feel in the contemplation 
of the career which the modern man has been called 
upon to pursue, individualism cannot be dismayed at 
the annals of the naturalism which had so much that 
was humanistic about it. In the one instance of Hobbes, 
a materialistic view of the world did not prevent an 
egoistic conception of human life; even one may well 
wonder how the abject naturalism of this thinker made 
it possible for him to assume the independent existence 
of the human self. Apparently there was something in 
this materialistic view of the world which justified the 
rash emancipation of the self-asserting individual. The 
sanctity of mediaevalism and the fineness of Florentine 
humanism had been unable to place the human subject 
in the independent position in which he found himself 
in the ethics of Hobbes. 

If it be thought that naturalism had the effect of 
removing man from the scene, it must not be over- 
looked that this new philosophy was hedonistic as well 
as egoistic. The world may not be conceived anthropo- 
logically as existing for the sake of man, but the new 
view of the world, far from taking away from the 
sense of enjoyment, placed the individual in a position 
which it had not been his to enjoy, even in the Garden 
of Epicurus. Whatever mediaevalism had done for the 
idea of man as idea, it had not seen fit to attribute to 
him that direct joy of life which modern naturalism 
so readily accorded him. Hedonism, however crude a 
form of an individualism which should evince the joy 
of life, was in strict accord with the naturalistic prin- 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 47 

ciples of the early Enlightenment, so that the interest 
of man did not really suffer from the introduction of 
a movement which seemed to drive man from the world. 
When, therefore, individualism seeks to balance the 
losses and gains of naturalism, it is prone to feel that, 
while there was some loss of dignity and beauty, the 
new sense of life, with its ideals of freedom and prog- 
ress, in some way compensated for that which had to 
be forfeited. If nature was capable of newer inter- 
pretations, so was man; if there could be a physical 
view of the universe, none the less could there be a 
psychological conception of man. 

(2) The Objective and Subjective 

The physical view of the world which once had been 
viewed aesthetically and spiritually, expressed itself in 
the form of a direct objectivity. With antiquity, the 
natural world had never succeeded in getting beyond 
the reach of the human mind. Before Socrates, Greek 
thought had indeed indulged in a naive naturalism; but 
the superiority of the world to the mind could not be 
affirmed until the character and scope of the mind had 
had the opportunity to express themselves. When the 
perceptualism of Protagoras attempted to make the 
mind subservient to its immediate impressions, the over- 
powering logic of Socrates and Plato soon silenced it. 
In the case of Scholasticism, no attempt was made to 
emancipate nature, except at the close of the period, 
when the modern idea had begun to dawn. The visible 
world, natura naturata, enjoyed no separate existence, 
but was ever subordinate to the spiritual idea of natura 
naturans. But, with the coming of modern thought, 
the ideas of antiquity and the beliefs of mediaevalism 
were overcome by the independent objectivity of the 
natural order, which was a law unto itself. The ideal- 
ized physics of Plato could not compare with the scien- 



48 THE GROUND AND GOAD OF HUMAN LIFE 

tific conception of physics as a science. With the dis- 
covery of the law of gravitation, it was no longer pos- 
sible to regard the natural order in any other than a 
mechanical manner, whence mathematics took the place 
of logic and faith. 

The analysis of the physical world thus produced 
facts, data, from which there could be no appeal to 
" ideas " ; the synthesis which these data allowed, in- 
stead of being Aristotelian categories, were laws estab- 
lished by patient investigation and faithful experiment. 
Instead of anticipating nature or preparing the way 
for her by means of artificially prepared avenues of 
approach, the thinker of the new period let the world 
indicate its own paths. The accepted method was the 
a posteriori one; so that the mind, if it desired to par- 
ticipate in the objective order, was forced to follow the 
analogy of the physical world. Hobbes was about the 
first to adapt his thought to the new method of pro- 
cedure; and, in his system, the internal was modeled 
upon the external. In this spirit, Hobbes bases his 
principles de homine upon the previously determined 
principles de cor pore, while he looks upon the behaviour 
of the human body and human mind as nothing but so 
many cases of that mechanical causation which the 
physical world displays universally. Nor does he vary 
from this rule of letting the physical world furnish the 
criterion of truth, when he comes to the question con- 
cerning the actions of men, as these result in the estab- 
lishment of the social order; the principles de cive are 
as mechanical as those of the physical world-order. 
In such an early system of naturalism, the supremacy 
of the objective world received its most complete 
recognition. 

The more intimate analysis of man, as this appeared 
in the psychological conception of the time, resulted in 
the establishment of the sensationalistic psychology. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 49 

Hobbes' theory of perception, as this was expressed 
most completely in his analysis of visual sensation, so 
identifies sensation with stimulus that motion in the 
body which is seen results in the motion of the eye, 
while in both brain and nerve, as also in the heart, 
which was for him the seat of sensation, nothing more 
than motion can be found. With the development of 
sensationalism, there was made a consistent departure 
from the relentless materialism of the earlier thinker, 
although nothing was attributed to the mind except 
that which could be found in the physical object of its 
sensations. This belief in the sufficiency of sensation- 
alism as a theory of perception expressed itself in char- 
acteristic fashion, when the one-time innate ideas of 
the mind were eliminated, and the content and behaviour 
of thought so analyzed as to cast all the credit upon the 
side of the exterior order. 

Where the physical thought of that time so clung to 
the idealistic prejudice, it placed itself in a paradoxical 
position; for its allegiance to the older order was cal- 
culated to arouse conflict with the ideas taken from the 
newer one. In the case of the sensationalists, the breach 
with mediaevalism had been complete; but, with the 
Cartesian school, there was a survival of the mediaeval 
conception of the soul; and the endeavor to place this 
spiritual soul in the physical body involved an insoluble 
dualism. With Descartes, the attempt to combine the 
Augustinian idea of the soul and the modern conception 
of the body, as interpreted by Harvey, precipitated a 
conflict which Descartes could not overcome, and which 
made necessary the devices of the Occasionalists. Like 
Hobbes, Descartes accepts the physical view of the 
world and the human body, but prefers to cling to the 
traditional conception of the mind; and the peculiar 
plight of the mind is nowhere better portrayed than in 
the Cartesian system. The form of the older " soul " 



5o 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



was still there, but the substance was lost, the powers had 
dwindled to nothing - ; all that the mind could do was to 
witness that which proceeds automatically. But, where 
the mind as thought had lost its control of the exterior 
world, that world as a system of forces was to fail in 
its attempt to produce the inner states of consciousness ; 
the complete materialism of Hobbes had given way 
before the relentless dualism of Descartes, so that the 
affairs of the self were as satisfactory and convincing 
as the affairs of the world. 

Later attempts at the promulgation of the sensation- 
alistic doctrine, which should establish the complete 
control of the natural order, show how impossible it 
had been to submerge the human mind in the material. 
At the beginning of his doctrine of the mind, Locke 
was one with Hobbes ; at the end, his position was 
practically the same as that of Descartes. Locke thus 
began by surrendering the mind to nature, as appeared 
from his assertion that nothing is innate, all is derived 
from the objective order; but the conclusion to the 
system of sensationalism found the empiricist admitting 
that mind could know nothing but ideas, the point at 
which the rationalist had begun. Moreover, the system 
of sensationalism made possible an idealism, which was 
as inimical to the physical as materialism had been 
toward the spiritual; where one had asserted the exist- 
ence of nothing but matter, the other asserted the exist- 
ence of nothing but mind. Materialism had plunged 
into dualism, and from this dualism an idealistic, or 
ideological view of the world had resulted. For this 
reason, it becomes difficult for the history of philosophy 
to see just how nature gained its alleged victory over 
the mind ; if nothing exists but matter, nothing is known 
but mind. 

The naturalization of the modern man seems, then, 
to have been a most ambiguous proceeding, since in its 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 51 

endeavor to make mind assert nature, mind has been 
found asserting something more akin to its own char- 
acter, the human self. It is a question whether sci- 
entism has been aware of the method it has been fol- 
lowing, while it is equally to be wondered whether the 
mind was conscious of the calculated result of its own 
conduct in the establishment of thought as such. Nat- 
uralism may indeed complain that the study of the 
exterior world has not been a sincere undertaking, 
wherein no admixture of the humanistic should be 
found; while individualism may protest that the naive 
deduction of the self, in the egoism and solipsism of 
the Enlightenment, was a conscious, voluntary act of 
the mind. Nevertheless, the claim that the modern 
ideal has been a naturistic one, that the modern aim 
has been the naturalization of humanity, is one which 
cannot be allowed without considerable qualification. 
Physical and humanistic systems grew up together, the 
one rejoicing in the emancipation of the world, the 
other happy in the thought that man had at last begun 
to exist. 

In the elevation of the physical, as this took place 
in connection with the inorganic world, the ego was 
in a position where its dignity was conserved. With 
far less knowledge of man than one enjoys to-day, the 
humanist of the Enlightenment found it possible to 
elevate the self above the world, so that the history of 
the Enlightenment is not without its satisfactions when 
it is read by the individualist of the present. The 
human self was not long in adjusting itself to the new 
conditions ; and, while the mechanical conception of the 
world may have seemed inimical to certain traditional 
ideas of man, there were new ideals which came forth 
to assert the independence of the self in the world. 
With the second development of naturalism, as this 
took place in connection with the organic world, the 



52 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



situation was more threatening to the inner, independ- 
ent life of the human self, although the history of the 
nineteenth century does not reveal the triumph of the 
natural over the spiritual. Like the elevation of the 
physical, the exaltation of the biological was not with- 
out its ambiguity, its contradiction. 

3. The; Elevation op the; Biological, 

The work of the latter part of the modern period, 
and that in which we are still living, was such as to 
present new problems for humanistic thought. At the 
same time, the history of the biological period fails to 
reveal the complete sway of the naturalistic, just as its 
history is not without inner contradiction. Where the 
mechanical metaphysics of the Enlightenment had elab- 
orated a synthesis which ever tended to thrust man out 
of the world, and to render the view of life a dualism 
in which the body was surrendered to nature while the 
mind was left to itself, organic scientism has shown the 
tendency to draw man in the complete system of nat- 
uralistic evolution. The thinker of the earlier period, 
even when he could not recognize the reflection of his 
own soul in the mirror of the mechanical world, could 
still insist upon the independent existence of that soul, 
as a being of another kind; for the less the soul was 
like nature, the more it was like itself. With the theory 
of descent, however, the principle of life in the outer 
world is so like that in the inner world that the differ- 
ence between the two forms of existence has become 
blurred, while the uniqueness and exceptional character 
of humanity has been all but lost to view. Thrust aside 
from mechanical nature, and with the feeling that the 
world no longer existed for him, the individual might 
still rejoice in the intrinsic character of the self, even 
when that self had lost its objectivity; but, drawn into 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 53 

the world and forced to make friends with it, the indi- 
vidual has been placed in a position where the clear 
outline of his life has been lost to view. 



(1) Positivism and Humanism 

The biological view, instead of abiding by the statu- 
esque notion of the human body, now regards that body 
as akin to lower forms of organic life, as indeed related 
to these according to the principles of descent. Not only 
the body, which had known the Egyptian bondage of 
physical naturalism, but the mind also was naturalized 
by the biological philosophy; the Origin of Species 
claims the one, the Descent of Man the other. For 
this reason, it seemed no longer possible to insist upon 
the truly humanistic, since the elaboration of the inner 
life, in the form of art, morality, and social existence, 
had been shown to be incident upon the principles of 
organic evolution. Everything, except the theory of 
evolution itself, was shown to have been implict in the 
original organism. 

In this perfection of the biological view, no room 
was left for either complaint or doubt; man was sup- 
posed to be satisfied with his lot. Under the auspices 
of physical naturalism, this was not the case; for there 
one found abundant opportunity to vent his spite upon 
the mechanical system which was laid upon his mind 
and heart. For this reason, the earlier period of mod- 
ern thought was not wanting in systems of skepticism, 
like those of Montaigne and Hume. But, with the ele- 
vation of the organic in nature, man was supposed to 
find such a degree of truth and such a depth of satis- 
faction as to make of life nothing more or less than 
an optimistic belief in that which is. This came about 
in relation to the social, which accompanied the bio- 
logical; and, when the spiritual with its inwardness was 



54 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



denied man, the social with its vast and varied objec- 
tivity was supposed to satisfy his mind and to content 
his will. In nature and man, there was supposed to 
be enough for the sound mind and the healthy will. 
This exaggeration of immediate existence came about 
logically in connection with positivism, wherein the 
principles of all science both mechanical and organic 
are placed upon a firm basis. The difference between 
eighteenth-century skepticism and nineteenth-century 
positivism may be seen when one recalls the cynicism 
of the earlier thinker in the defeat of his intellect with 
the optimism of the later one in his spirit of resignation 
to the world as given in experience; where one had 
failed to find, the other had not thought to seek. 

The theoretical assets of the positivist system were 
not equal, however, to the spiritual demands made upon 
them; and, where the positivist had flattered himself 
that, at last, he had found a scheme of thought per- 
fectly adapted to mankind, the history of the nineteenth 
century reveals the spirit of radical discontent. It was 
possible for a spiritual thinker like Spinoza to accept 
the mechanical philosophy of his age, and to transform 
it into an idealistic theory of life where all was gain 
for the contemplative spirit of mankind. In the same 
manner, Leibnitz laid hold upon the same physical 
philosophy and reduced it to optimism. But, with a 
theory of life supposed to be adapted to the nature of 
man as a creature of earth, and one which was cal- 
culated to bring to him all the results of science and 
social existence, there was no lack of idealistic protest, 
as this appeared in philosophic pessimism and social 
strife. In the case of Schopenhauer, the struggle for 
existence, which he called the Will-to-Live, was looked 
upon with the greatest degree of despair, while the 
social instinct, which with Schopenhauer was derived 
directly from the participation of all individuals in the 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 55 

one Will, yielded nothing but the painful sense of com- 
passion. Nature had not been able to keep her word; 
society was bankrupt when it sought to redeem its 
promises to the individual. The earlier thinker had 
sought to prove only that his system was true; the later 
one endeavored to show that his was both true and 
good, and it was the goodness as much as the truth that 
the disinterested individual felt called upon to question. 
Had not positivism, in shutting out the view of the 
spiritual, demanded that man be happy in his earth-like 
humanity, this complaint could not have been forth- 
coming. 

When individualism considers the positivist system, 
it feels constrained to suggest that it was not merely 
the cloud that was cast over the spiritual, but the extra 
light which was cast upon the natural which caused so 
much intellectual dissatisfaction. The trouble with the 
naturalistic was that it was too true; that is, that too 
great a measure of truth had been accorded to it. 
Furthermore, there was an air of finality about it, 
which seemed to violate the law of progress which 
positivism itself had sought to deduce. Having spoken 
of the theological and metaphysical as having had their 
day in the world, Comte felt free to assume that the 
coming of the scientific regime was the beginning of 
the end. With science once established, " the philo- 
sophical system of the moderns will be in fact com- 
plete, as there will be no phenomenon which does not 
naturally enter into some one of the five great cate- 
gories. All our fundamental conceptions having become 
homogeneous, the Positivist state will be fully estab- 
lished. It can never again change its character, though 
it will be forever in course of development by additions 
of new knowledge." 17 As Aristotle felt that his thought 
marked finality for the ancient, as well as for all the 

11 Positivist Philosophy, tr. Martineau, 30. 



56 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

world, as Aquinas assumed that he had spoken the 
last word for Christianity, so Comte assumes to speak 
eschatologically for the final, or modern, period of 
human thought. 

But, far from shutting out the development of the 
humanistic, the positivist system made room for man 
in the sixth division of the system, although Comte 
determined to consider humanity, not in its free form, 
but in the light of social physics. At the same time, 
Comte tends to depart from the supremacy of his natur- 
ism when he admits that the purpose of the positivist 
philosophy, instead of being that which is naturalistic 
and scientific, consists in the study of sociology, a term 
which he introduces in the second chapter of the book 
on Social Physics. 18 Somewhat of the force of posi- 
tivism is weakened by this frank admission that the 
aim of the work is not to give an account of the natural 
sciences; while the argument for the sufficiency and 
supremacy of the naturalistic loses more influence when 
it is asserted that " there can be no positive philosophy 
without a basis of social science, without which it could 
not be all-comprehensive." 19 Indeed, the idea of the 
author of the new system was not to give a course of 
positive science, but a course of positive philosophy. 

With the social treated in a philosophical manner, 
where thought meets thought, individualism cannot feel 
unduly alarmed at the pretensions of this most char- 
acteristic system of the nineteenth century, especially 
as that period witnessed the first genuine philosophy of 
individualism that the world had seen. Furthermore, 
-if one accepts the fundamental principle of the evolu- 
tionary philosophy which followed upon the positivism 
of Comte, one is still in a position where he may uphold 
the fundamental principles of individualism. To show 

- 19 Positivist Philosophy, tr. Martineau, 444. 
19 lb., 31. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 57 

that humanity has had a past is to suggest that it has 
a future; and to consider the human species as the 
product of some natural force like that of natural 
selection does not forbid that this same species may 
turn upon nature, wrest her principle from her, and 
apply it to the interests of human life as such. As a 
matter of fact, the behaviour of the leading species 
more than suggests that just this thing has been done: 
man has trained his mind that it may enable him to 
work with an . eye to the ultimate result he desires to 
achieve, while he has elaborated tools calculated to 
further the work of his will. For this reason, if evo- 
lution be the last word of scientism, it may be assumed 
that the secret of the naturalistic process was entrusted 
to the human species to be applied after the manner 
of man's own genius. Even when we assume that the 
social life and environment of man was also the product 
of evolution, the work of man as individual breaks the 
spell, and the creature escapes. In this manner, the 
principle of continuity outdoes itself; it produces a 
creature which finally superseded it. 

(2) Biology and Psychology 

As the purely naturistic view of philosophy could not 
dispense with the humanistic in the form of the social, 
so the completion of biology's work in the analysis of 
the functions of the human brain were destined to 
release humanistic and individualistic principles whose 
range was far from being limited by the circle of the 
organic. If consciousness as a modern idea could arise 
in connection with the mechanical philosophy of the 
seventeenth century, it became still easier for it to 
prove its independent existence when thought inclined 
itself more to the organic. At the same time, the psy- 
chologist of the nineteenth century was more in danger 



5 8 THE GROUND AND GOAL. OF HUMAN LIFE 

from his biological friends than was the psychologist 
of the seventeenth century in danger from his mechan- 
istic enemies. When the mechanical philosopher ex- 
plained the whole of the universe upon the basis of 
matter and motion, he did no more than neglect con- 
sciousness, while the biological thinker of the later 
period sought such an explanation of consciousness as 
tended to explain the latter away. Yet, the career of 
modern physiological psychology has had to do with 
the actual content of consciousness rather than with its 
form, as this is to be worked in connection with theory, 
so that where there has been an access of material 
produced by observation and experiment, the form of 
the mind has been left untouched rather than violated 
by the science of psychology as such. 

Yet, with all the importance of biological psychology 
in its development of the conscious content, the form 
of the mind was not wholly neglected, while the dis- 
cussion of this latter, instead of confining itself to the 
abstractionism of the seventeenth century, had to do 
with the nature of mind as immediately felt within. 
In this manner, arose the intellectualism of Herbart 
and the voluntarism of Schopenhauer in the light of 
which we are now able to understand the character and 
conduct of the mind as never before. In the case of 
Schleiermacher, who sought to place the self upon the 
emotional nature of the mind, there was made the first, 
if not the most complete, attempt to construct the soul 
out. of its own conscious material, instead of foisting 
upon the mind some extra " essence " or " reality " of 
which the mind was not conscious. All that goes on 
in the mind, all thinking, all willing, is to be understood, 
not as the activity of some inscrutable soul, but as the 
natural operation of feeling, in which the balance be- 
tween cognition and conation is ever kept up. In such 
feeling, the unity and identity of the mind reveals its 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 59 

manifold character in its impressions and impulses, in 
its thoughts and acts. Herbart was equally anxious to 
rid his psychology of the extra-metaphysical; and, as 
Schleiermacher had attempted to derive the whole 
unified content of consciousness from feeling, Herbart 
made a similar attempt in connection with thought, 
with the Vorstellung. Not to be outdone by such 
aestheticism and intellectualism, Schopenhauer sought to 
reduce all feeling and thinking to a primary willing, 
whence all three functions of consciousness had the 
opportunity to contribute to the theory of the self. 
When these attempts at the theory of the self are taken 
into account, it becomes difficult to understand how 
physiological psychology with its " brain " could have 
dismayed those who were interested in a more sufficient 
way of securing the unity of the self. 

When psychology was poor, the individual was rich; 
now that psychology has grown rich, personality is 
awakening to its poverty. This situation, which has 
come about in the transmutation of mind and world, 
of self and society, is particularly annoying to individ- 
ualism, which looks with dismay upon the vast accumu- 
lations of psychological science only to realize that the 
wealth is not for the ego which produced it. The 
property and glory which were destined for the self 
have been appropriated by the spinal cord. The furtive 
attempts at introspection found in such thinkers as 
Augustine and Descartes, aided by no science of con- 
sciousness, did not fail to evince the existence of the 
ego, while the elaborately organized systems of research 
peculiar to the genius of the nineteenth century have 
uncovered and exploited everything but the self. The 
introspective labors of mankind, like the industrial 
activities of the race, have had the melancholy effect 
of depriving humanity of that which it was intended 
to possess — the natural resources of the earth and the 



60 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

spiritual resources of the soul. For this reason, indi- 
vidualism is called upon to rehabilitate the interior ex- 
istence of the self, in order that it may make it possible 
for the ego to say, " I think," " I will," " I am." 

The irrationalistic and immoralistic revolt offered a 
general, uncritical protest against the narrow synthesis 
offered in place of nature and humanity, and it was no 
difficult task for the Decadent to leap over the Tartar 
wall. Individualism, however, is capable of a more 
systematic development, in the course of which it will 
be called upon to introduce more analysis of the inner 
consciousness of the self. The present condition of 
things represents psychology at the apex of its influence. 
The greater psychologists have passed away, leaving 
their imitators to repeat and refine the original data. 
With the consciousness that the empirical field of ordi- 
nary, uncultivated consciousness has been more than 
sufficiently tilled, the most advanced psychologist now 
shows a disposition to depart from the habitual realm of 
investigation and thus look into the infra-introspective 
and supra-introspective. As a result, the psychology of 
the animal mind and the psychology of the religious 
and social forms of consciousness have arisen. Psy- 
chologism is thus getting beyond itself. 

The contention of individualism, then, is to the effect 
that synthetic, expansive method having done its des- 
tined work, should no longer be allowed to hinder the 
development of a psychology which shall undertake to 
exploit the individual, in order that the individual may 
find his place in the world and assert his position in 
the social order. With the older individualists who 
kept pace with the psychologists, egoism was only a 
revolt, so that the nineteenth century witnessed a 
diremption between the under-personal and the over- 
personal study of the soul. Helmholtz and Stirner, 
Wundt and Nietzsche, Fouillee and Hello, serve to 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 6 1 

represent the more striking features of this contrast. 
The psychologist has suffered for want of a goal; the 
individualist has been handicapped because of the in- 
sufficient ground on which his claim rested: here, it 
has been over-democratic; there, over-aristocratic. As 
a result, those who feel that human destiny is at stake, 
and who wish to know the spirit they are of, have been 
unable to find the instruction and nourishment of which 
they have so long stood in need. Why has it not been 
possible to make use of the material so generously 
offered by psychology? Why has the application of 
psychological methods produced only the petty and 
practical? The major concerns of human life — art, 
morality, religion — have been able to find so little 
which could be put to genuine application. 

The individualist has three affirmations to make: 
"I think," "I will," "I exist." No longer does he 
assert that upon his perceiving thought does the exist- 
ence of the world depend, that upon his will and its 
consent has society been brought into being, that upon 
the basis of his self-existence the major premise of 
spiritual life is based; the individualist desires the "I 
think," the " I will," and the " I am," for reasons of 
his own. In all this, the individualist does not plead 
for self-existence, for he is more likely to threaten 
after the manner of the egoist of the nineteenth cen- 
tury; the individualist is content to affirm his selfhood 
in the uniqueness of its inner states of consciousness 
and the integrity of its self -impelled volitions. The 
individual would live within and work from within; 
hence he must resent any further attempts to exterior- 
ize his being as these have been carried on in scientific 
and social thinking. 

In more than one way, the present age resembles the 
period of Sophistry among the ancients. The hurried 
generalization of the physical philosophers and the nar- 



62 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

row synthesis which they cast about humanity was met 
by Anaxagoras and Gorgias in somewhat the same way 
that physical and social thinking have been opposed 
by egoists from Schelegel to Nietzsche. Can we deny 
that our age of individualism has repeated the maxim, 
Man is the measure of all things? Can we hide from 
ourselves the fact that our need, like theirs, is the need 
of a Socrates who shall give us the clue to the higher 
synthesis we need? We believe that the Romanticists 
were justified in declaring, Art for art's sake, just as 
we must sympathize with the Decadents in their claim 
for the independence of the individual; yet we must 
feel that there is a more perfect individualism than 
these Sophists were able to elaborate. Individualists 
are now placed in a position where they have nothing 
to assent to but the extremes of the egoistic movement 
upon which they look with both satisfaction and sus- 
picion. How can one tolerate the Satanism of Baude- 
laire unless one observes in it the remote desire for the 
independence of the human self? By what depth of 
indulgence has Nietzsche been treated, and how is this 
to be explained unless we assume that his reader, feel- 
ing oppressed by the existing social conditions, suffers 
this immoralist to express some sense of the dissatis- 
faction that the reader himself has already felt? Now 
the popularity of the irrationalistico-immoralistic move- 
ment seems attributable to no other cause than the desire 
for an individualism which has long been thwarted by 
the culture of the age. 

III. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF SCIENTISM 

If science were nothing but science, the claim that 
it has not kept its word with man, that it has failed, 
that it does not satisfy, could not be preferred against 
it; but science is scientism, a doctrine of human life 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 63 

based upon the observation of and experiment upon 
that which goes on in the material world. As a doc- 
trine of life, scientism proposed to indicate the con- 
ditions under which real human life might be lived; 
this it did when it connected its doctrine of the physical 
with its ideal of the social, whence science and sociality 
have for a century gone hand in hand. The way was 
opened by the Positive Philosophy, and it has been 
faithfully followed by the exponents of the naturalistic 
school. In asserting that science is unequal to its task, 
individualism does somewhat more than was done by 
such anti-scientific leaders as Desjardins, Paulhan, Rod, 
and Vogue; moreover, it finds it necessary to be more 
systematic than were such geniuses as Nietzsche and 
Villiers; individualism attempts to show that, not in 
religion alone, nor yet as a general protest, but as a 
system of life, the scientific fails to bring man into 
right relations with himself or the world. Individual- 
ism, with its dialectic of sensation, volition, and intel- 
lection, shows us that in art, in ethics, and in religion, 
the principles of scientism have been unconvincing and 
unsatisfactory, whence a higher synthesis of things 
natural and things human has become the demand of 
the hour. 

1. The; Sensational Inadequacy of Scientism 

While the conflict in which science affected to engage 
its forces was usually understood as the " conflict be- 
tween science and religion," there was, none the less, 
a conflict between science and art. Where the first 
conflict was carried on by science in such a manner 
that religion was ever placed on the defensive, and 
where religion finally sought to settle accounts with 
science, the second conflict was carried on in the name 
of art against science. To assure one's mind of the 



64 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

militant attitude of aesthetics, one has only to remem- 
ber the history of the romantic, decadent, and symbolist 
schools, where the principles of fixed objectivity so dear 
to science were habitually flouted, while the aesthete 
still found it possible to produce a view of life and the 
world. This it did, first, by means of extreme roman- 
ticism, then, by means of an equally extreme realism. 
In the case of the romantic element in modern aes- 
thetics, little need be said to show how independent was 
the genius, and how far removed was his art from the 
calculations and demonstrations of scientism. With 
realism, even when a certain parallel with scientism 
might perhaps be drawn, there was still a certain mental 
audacity on the part of the artist, whence his ideas were 
prevented from falling within the fixed circle of scien- 
tific verity. It was with the exceptional, the morbid, 
that the realist had to do, while it is the aim of science 
to organize facts according to general principles. For 
this reason, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, and Zola cannot be 
claimed by science, even when they belong to the 
" naturalistic " school of literature. Art elaborated its 
romanticism and realism in defiance of scientific truth 
rather than in accordance with its principles. 

That which renders art free from the methods of 
scientific thought is, first of all, the principle of intu- 
ition. The limits of scientific logic appear in connec- 
tion with the usual methods of induction and deduction 
which it finds convenient to employ; first the analysis, 
then the synthesis, in the process of which science ex- 
hausts its possibilities. In the case of aesthetic intu- 
ition, the method consists of neither the inductive nor 
the deductive, although, like science, art has to do 
with the phenomena of the perceptible world. In the 
employment of intuition, as a cognitio tertii generis, 
aesthetics is able to perceive the whole in the part, so 
that a single statue may stand for mankind, an isolated 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 65 

landscape represent nature, a drama present the prob- 
lem of human life as such. In the midst of this method 
of intuition, art reserves the right to indulge in that 
which to science would be irrationalism, which may 
reveal itself, as it did in Classicism, by means of the 
Dionysian, or may assume the form of the morbid, as 
it has done in the larger history of Romanticism. In 
the career of the nineteenth century art, where aes- 
thetics has made war upon science, the development of 
the morbid has had the effect of showing how success- 
ful art may be, even when it ignores the accepted 
method of contemporaneous thinking. By means of the 
intuitive, then, art has ever been free from the dictation 
of any other form of mental life. In our own day, it 
is a significant fact that a scientist like Nordau, in his 
Degeneration, should find it necessary to condemn prac- 
tically every form of literature which has been produced 
since 1850. 

Not only does art oppose science in connection with 
the method of thought, where free intuition contemns 
exact calculation, but it exercises a certain creativeness 
which renders it still further independent of a science 
which can only follow the dictates of nature. When, 
therefore, we speak of science as that which has failed 
to satisfy the modern mind, we must not overlook the 
fact that, unlike religion, art has not felt the sense of 
want for whose consolation it looked in vain to science. 
With its inherent sense of fulness, art has continually 
gone beyond science, so that the complaint of insuffi- 
ciency has not been directly voiced by the aesthetic 
mind. Art has recognized that science was insufficient 
as a life-ideal, but that has not prevented art from 
developing its own view of existence. The irrational 
factor of creativeness, so well realized in modern music, 
cannot fail to reveal the freedom with which the aes- 
thetic mind has handled the things of the world. There 



66 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is nothing in the whole range of science that can explain 
the creative character of art; there has been nothing 
among the resources of science, which has so often 
checked faith, which has been able to prohibit artistic 
creation. Where art has held back, it has not been 
because it has felt the threat of science, but because it 
has been wanting in itself, because it has been injured 
by commercialism. During the history of the recent 
scientific movement, art may not have been at the high- 
est peak of its genius, but no period of its history has 
found it enjoying a more perfect sense of freedom. 

So imperative have been the demands of scientism, 
with such relentless critics of spiritual life as Comte, 
Spencer, Darwin, and Haeckel behind it, that we have 
been led to experience an enduring distrust of ourselves 
when we have sought to construe the life of humanity 
as something independent in nature. The play within 
the play, the kingdom within the kingdom, has suffered 
violence from without. How could the conscious state, 
with its ideas and initiatives, be anything more than an 
eighteenth-century " copy " of external impression, or 
a nineteenth-century " correlate " of some physical 
process? How could we tolerate the impulse, except 
as we allowed it to be no more than the continuation 
of some exterior force? Assert the right of the mind 
to frame its own ideas and inaugurate its own volitions, 
and the result was sure to be an irrationalism ; obey the 
dictates of scientism, and deny the validity of inner idea 
and impulse, then and then only could peace come to 
the mind. In the midst of this perplexity of the mind, 
aestheticism has sought to uphold the sanctity of the 
inner life, even where aestheticism has been forced to 
resort to extreme measures in its attempt to overcome 
complete objectivity. Aestheticism, indifferent as it has 
been to the demands of nature and social life, has shown 
itself unwilling to relinquish the supreme principle of 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 67 

the joy of life; upon this it has insisted, and from this 
it has not been deterred by any distrust of decadence, 
so that it is in aestheticism that scientism has found its 
most vigorous opponent, in aestheticism that individual- 
ism has found its most heroic champion. 

Where scientism has asserted that satisfaction and 
peace could come only as one submitted to the physical 
and social, aestheticism has elaborated a noble pessimism, 
which, when it reposed in passivism, still upheld the 
supremacy of the inner, conscious state; which, when 
it resorted to malignant activism and cruelty, still main- 
tained the validity of the human initiative. If, to be 
rational, the mind was called upon to be " scientific," 
the command of aestheticism was, Be irrationalistic ! 
If, in order to be moral, the will was expected to be 
" social," the exhortation of aestheticism was, Be im- 
moralistic ! Aestheticism has shown the individual what 
he has a right to expect from the world, what he has 
a right to demand of society; warned by scientism arid 
inspired by aestheticism, the individual has been led to 
inquire what " being one's self " really means. At the 
same time, with the conflicting tendencies of scientism 
and aestheticism at work within the mind, the indi- 
vidual has been able to observe how rival views of the 
world may be developed; and, while the world of sci- 
entism may seem to be far more complete and con- 
sistent than an aesthetic cosmos could hope to be, it has 
the one grand disadvantage of being so systematic as 
to exclude the individual, who has thus turned to the 
more cloudy and chaotic world-order of the creative 
aesthetic consciousness. The individual may not have 
been able to find peace in the world, but he has found 
it possible to exist and express himself without forfeit- 
ing his character. 

Upon the authority of aestheticism, the individual 
takes his stand in the world of nature, even when 



68 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

scientism has sought to exercise complete sway over 
phenomenal existence. In distinction from scientific 
naturalism, which endeavors to bring about the imme- 
diate and uncritical acceptance of the impression, aes- 
theticism has insisted that all sense-impressions be so 
relegated to the characteristic nature of the mind that 
the resulting soul-state should not fail to bear the stamp 
of humanity. Aestheticism, which has never released 
its hold upon the natural order, may seem to have been 
somewhat ideological when it suggested that there was 
something significant in the very act of receiving the 
impression; but the real motive of aestheticism was to 
prevent the mind from being driven out of itself by the 
incoming impression. Were it possible for the human 
mind to receive its impressions in a passive consenting 
manner, the result would be no more than a superior 
grade of animalistic perception in which no aesthetic 
sensitivity, no artistic spontaneity would have been pos- 
sible. The mind of the individual is at once contem- 
plative and creative; it receives impressions and reacts 
upon them as it will. If it cannot control the source 
of the impression and impulse, it can still exercise 
authority over them; if it cannot say what impressions 
and impulses shall come, it can determine the charac- 
teristic manner in which they shall be received. There 
is thus more than one way of entering into relations 
with the natural order, so that the presumption of sci- 
ence to be solitary in the field is without foundation; 
art as well as science can lead the mind about among 
the forms of the natural order; and it has been under 
the leadership of art that the individual has been able 
to find his place in the world. 

Aestheticism does not spoil its plea of being an inter- 
preter of nature when it frankly asserts that it has the 
welfare of the human soul at heart; nor can any criti- 
cism violate the principle of disinterestedness which 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 69 

has been the foundation of all aesthetic contemplation. 
Scientism has assumed to take nature for what it was 
worth, and to exercise a mental vision in which no 
prejudice should veil the truth from its eyes. But the 
foregoing analysis of naturalism has shown us that, 
instead of being disinterested, scientism has never been 
able to conceal its desire to benefit mankind. This 
attempt to be a philosophy of life has shown itself in 
both a negative and a positive manner; first, it was the 
desire to deliver man from the mystical; then, it became 
the hope of establishing man in a social order, which 
should be the counterpart of the natural one;- both 
Comte and Spencer seem to have been as much inter- 
ested in man as in the world. Thus it appears that the 
veil of scientism is as closely woven as that of aestheti- 
cism, and the claim of disinterestedness turns out to be 
a pretence, a bit of deception. Scientism has demanded 
that the view of the world that man should entertain 
should come forth in response to certain mental motives 
according to which the spiritual should be denied that 
participation in the world which was reserved for the 
social. Aestheticism has not been na'ive in its view of 
nature, although it can hardly be questioned that the 
aesthetic motive has been purer than the scientific one; 
aestheticism has insisted that the world should be re- 
garded as the place of enjoyment, just as scientism has 
assumed that the world should be the place of human, 
social development; one has sought a garden, the other 
a field of activity. Now nature itself, as intuited by 
the animal mind, is neither one nor the other; and it 
has been in response to a direct humanism that both 
the scientific and the aesthetical have come into being 
to be judged according to their relative worth and suf- 
ficiency. When aestheticism asserts that science does 
not satisfy, it has no special complaint to offer; aes- 
theticism simply affirms that science has not been equal 
to the task of interpreting the world to the human mind. 



7 o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 
2. The; Voutionai, Impotence; of Scientism 

Where science has shown its inability to measure up 
to the demands of human sensitivity, whence aestheti- 
cism has had to reveal to the individual his more com- 
plete relation to the sensuous world, it has shown itself 
impotent to account for that human spontaneity of 
motive under the guidance of which man has sought to 
do his work in the world; for this reason, a supra-scien- 
tific ethics has had to assert its independence. It cannot 
be asserted that modern moralism has been quite as free 
and polemical as modern art, for where aestheticism 
suffered from no excessive scruples, the ethical con- 
sciousness has not ever been so willing to assert the 
independence of a moral life which should have no con- 
cern for the welfare of the social order. Still, it can- 
not be denied that, as aestheticism with a Baudelaire 
felt free to spurn the scientific organization of nature, 
the moralism of a Nietzsche has been just as ready to 
contemn the social organization of humanity. If mod- 
ern moralism, with its constant tendency toward im- 
moralism, has been less militant than aestheticism, it 
may be pointed out that the attitude of scientism toward 
the moral problem has not been altogether unfriendly, 
so that the moralist has often found in the scientist a 
certain amount of furtherance. That which moralism 
has to say in opposition to scientism is that scientism 
has been incomplete and unworthy, not that it has been 
threatening or destructive. 

To consider the calculated effects of the new physics 
and the new biology, whereby the earth was dethroned 
and man relegated to the animal order, would seem to 
promise the dawning of a new and most destructive 
morality. Under the auspices of the elder view of the 
world and man, it was not difficult to impose upon 
humanity a peculiar sense of moral obligation, just as 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 71 

it was quite possible to arouse within a certain sense 
of moral dignity. With the earth in a strategic posi- 
tion in nature and with man in a superior attitude, the 
august principles of conscience and duty could easily 
be promulgated; but, with both earth and humanity 
degraded, it is not so easy to understand how scientism 
could continue to uphold and enforce the old morale. 
At the beginnings of modern thought, some sense of 
freedom was suggested when Hobbes placed man in the 
destructive status naturalis; but the repudiation of this 
view of morality by both rigorists and hedonists closed 
all the doors of a naturalistic morality before the mod- 
ern man was able to enter them. With the coming of 
the new biology, there was no attempt to indulge the 
freedom from spiritual life which scientism might have 
held out to humanity, while the emancipation of the 
intellect failed to bring about a corresponding eman- 
cipation of the will, so that scentism, which has been 
severe with human ideals, has been strangely tender 
toward human impulses. To study nature meant to 
love mankind. 

Where science, to be true to its mission, should have 
been silent on the subject of ethics, it was soon heard 
echoing the fundamental principles of Christianity, so 
that, if it be asserted that science overcame religion in 
the latter's view of the world, it may be replied that 
religion overcame science in the latter's estimate of life. 
It was because he felt science to be aping religion in 
ethics that Nietzsche found it necessary to oppose both 
alike. " Where science is not the latest manifestation 
of the ascetic ideal, it is a subterfuge for every kind of 
discontent, unbelief, mental gnaw-worm, and bad con- 
science. They have acted in concert — the poor in 
spirit and the scientists — so I have called them the 
hectics of the spirit." 20 Darwin's famous chapter on 

20 Genealogy of Morals, tr. Haussemann, III. § 25. 



72 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

Moral Sense reveals the eminent advocate of latter-day 
scientism bowing before the " short but imperious word 
ought." 21 It matters not that he strives to interpret 
this forbidding word in the naturalistic manner which 
makes it appear as " the consciousness of the existence 
of a persistent instinct " ; he has succumbed to one of 
the most characteristic principles of Christian ethics, 
while his psychology of remorse places him in the 
desert beside John the Baptist. Where scientism had 
the mental courage to indulge in agnosticism, it was 
wanting in the moral courage which should have led 
it to immoralism, so that the student of ethics, when 
he seeks the source of advanced moral ideals, is forced 
to turn from the scientist, who has not " arrived," to 
the artist who has made a law unto himself. 

That which a moral theory is supposed to do may 
be understood when we consider the nature of action 
and the character of work. Now scientism has not 
settled accounts with the individual, who was supposed 
to be sufficiently aroused and contented with the ex- 
pression of his social nature; and the social nature of 
man, while a phase of his total being, is not sufficiently 
central or commanding to guide the individual will. 
Genuine human action has its source in something 
deeper, its goal in something higher than anything 
which the congregative nature of the individual has 
ever revealed; so that in the attempt at self-expression 
and the desire for self-realization, the ego goes round 
the social or passes through it. It is true that such 
individualistic action may receive a social coloring, as 
when one interprets his ideals in the light of human 
needs; but from this it does not follow that the indi- 
vidual must wait for the social to arouse him to action, 
or rest content with the social sanction of that which 
he has done. The social is something incidental and 

21 Descent of Man, Ch. III. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 73 

local; and, while it may ever accompany the course of 
individualistic action, it does not have the power to 
bound that action as its termini a quo or ad quern, as 
action passes from pole to pole. Where, as in tradi- 
tional morality, action springs from conscience, sci- 
entism has sought to render this " conscience " social ; 
and, where such action aims at the creation of a value, 
social scientism has endeavored to reduce this to utility. 
Now the most fundamental moral systems have been 
able to initiate action and provide for its results with- 
out the aid of the social sanction : Plato and Aristotle 
were fortunate enough to escape it; Spinoza and Kant 
never stooped to it; Nietzsche and Hello only despised 
it. With such moralists, the source and sanction of 
morality were devised in a manner wholly independent 
of the social ideal. 

The career of social moralism did indeed find many 
ethical philosophies bowing before the authoritarian 
ideal of social sympathy; yet the progress of such 
amiable thinking was called upon to witness the rise 
and growth of a vigorous immoralism. The explana- 
tion of this strange situation, which indeed is not far 
to seek, should be a warning to all who endeavor to 
subsume human strivings under some limited and super- 
ficial ideal, while the complete failure of social moral- 
ity should arouse our resolution never again to play 
with the human will. The conflict between social moral- 
ism and individualistic immoralism is to be understood 
in the light of two opposed notions inherent in the 
human will ; these are the notions of strength and weak- 
ness. Social moralism has been based upon weakness, 
individualistic immoralism upon strength. The idea of 
strength was the secret of the Satanism of Milton and 
Blake in the Enlightenment, and it was the same idea 
which aroused the nihilism of Turgenieff and Dostoiev- 
sky, the immoralism of Wagner and Nietzsche. Such 



74 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



thinkers were anti-social, not because they opposed the 
ideal of society as such, but because that fond idea was 
clothed in soft raiment. Scientism proceeded upon the 
basis of human weakness when it premised the idea 
that the human mind was capable of carrying on its 
cognitions with the perceptible only; and it went from 
weakness to weakness when it further asserted that the 
human will could do no more than assert the needs of 
mankind. Individualism, however, was possessed of an 
aestheticism which shrank not from the morbid and 
mysterious, of an immoralism which did not hesitate to 
will all that is in man, even the egoistic and vicious. 
Scientism, by making its fatuous appeal to the social, 
was thus guilty of arousing the satanism of strength 
within the will of the individual. 

To assert the insufficiency of scientism, then, it is 
only necessary to observe that man will assert himself, 
and that no bland suggestions of social responsibility 
will ever be sufficient to curb the might of the will 
within him. As art will create even when science can- 
not sanction its aesthetic ideals, so morality will exert 
itself in the assertion of the individual even when sci- 
entism may attempt to instill into the bad conscience 
of one who fears to be anti-social. When human con- 
science was believed to be the voice of God or the 
dictate of reason, it was with difficulty that the moral- 
ist could set up the idea of sin as his goal; but when 
conscience became social, it was by no means difficult 
for the individual to break down the feeble barriers 
which science sought to build about mankind. In the 
career of modern ethics, one may observe the progress 
of immoralism in the attempt to substitute rationalism 
for Theism, the social for the rational; but not until 
the social became the accepted sanction of morality 
was immoralism established as the creed of strength. 
Milton and Blake, it is true, did go so far as to oppose 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 75 

the narrowness of a rationalistic morale, but they failed 
to systematize their immoralism in the way that modern 
satanists have done; at the same time, they seem to 
have had no influence upon the immoralism of the nine- 
teenth century. In that period, it was the exaltation of 
the social ideal which led to the negation of morality, 
whence we are in a position to observe how ineffectual 
in the mind of an advanced individualist, the social 
sanction of morality may be. 

3. The: Intellectual, Disappointment of Scientism 

Scientism has had more influence over ethics than 
over art, more influence over religion than over ethics; 
scientism ignored art, made peace with morality, and 
then sought to negate religion. The attitude of science 
toward religion and of religion toward science is one 
which we are just beginning to understand, now that 
the conflict has passed into history. First of all, indi- 
vidualism shows us that the opposition between the 
new view of the physical world and the older forms 
of culture, represented by art, ethics, and religion, 
while looked upon as the conflict of science with re- 
ligion, was really a conflict between purely physical 
thinking and idealism ; it was a three-cornered conflict, 
in which art opposed science, science opposed religion, 
while ethics divided itself into two camps, one submit- 
ting to science, the other opposing it by means of im- 
moralism. Furthermore, the polemical attitude of sci- 
ence toward religion shows itself to have been of a 
twofold nature, inasmuch as science not only sought to 
negate religion, but attempted to provide a substitute 
for it in the form of a " religion of humanity," a 
" religion of science." First, it was a malicious enemy ; 
then it became a dangerous friend. 

To understand how such different things as science 
and religion could come into conflict, we must realize 



76 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

that agreement lay at the heart of their disagreement, 
as the rival monarchs, Charles the Fifth and Francis 
the First agreed on one point : both wanted the city 
of Milan ! Both science and religion agree upon one 
point : both want to interpret the world. The oppo- 
sition of science to nature, when expressed in its most 
general terms, was the opposition of naturalism to super- 
naturalism, in connection with which science finds the 
hypothesis of an extra-mundane Being, who creates 
and governs the world for the sake of man, and whose 
operations are seen in miracles, while the knowledge of 
Him comes by means of revelations, an hypothesis which 
is not only useless but harmful. Science will have the 
world conducted in a purely physical fashion, while it 
will regard man in the light of the new biology, which 
makes man the product of natural evolution. With 
these changes in point of view, the ideas of God and 
the soul seem all but lost to religion; and, since religion 
has accustomed itself to regard God and the soul in 
connection with a cosmology which places the Deity 
outside the world, and assumes that man's position there 
is quite extraordinary, the ideas of spiritual life in both 
Deity and humanity seem lost to it. The field of con- 
flict was thus the world; but the ideas at stake were 
those of the world's Creator and its peculiar creature, 
man. 

Viewed in their respective fields, science and religion 
would seem to have nothing in common : science is 
supposed to follow science for its own sake, to pursue 
special forms of investigation, and to arrange their data 
in the most exact manner; religion is supposed to deal 
with the needs of human life, which it organizes upon 
a purely subjective basis. Science follows the leading 
of sense and thus studies the objective world; religion 
pursues things of the spirit, whence it seeks to elaborate 
a subjective order of existence. Yet, this state of things 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE yy 

was calculated to produce a sharp dualism in existence, 
or to lay extra emphasis on the dualism of things and 
values already there, so that both science and religion 
could not refrain from indulging in a synthesis of things 
natural and spiritual. Religion had long since extended 
its sway over the physical world, where it sought to 
dogmatize concerning the origin of the world and the 
destiny of the soul; for the ideas of God and the self 
were to religion something more than subjective senti- 
ments. It was at this point that the real conflict be- 
tween science and religion had its rise. Science was 
unwilling to admit the supernatural origin and govern- 
ment of the natural world, just as it seemed to find it 
impossible to regard the human soul as anything more 
than a combination of things material; science thus 
sought to substitute the idea of natural evolution in the 
course of which the human soul made its appearance 
in a manner far from extraordinary. In both Comte 
and Haeckel, this opposition to the dogmatic notions 
of God and the soul were the foci of the contention 
between science and religion. 

Concerning the merits of science in its criticism of 
religious dogmatism, it cannot be denied that religion 
has had to learn that it cannot be rash in its attempt 
to transfer to the facts of experience the values which 
it has elaborated within the soul, even when it may 
still hold fast to these values as such. Science has 
taught religion that it must proceed soberly in its think- 
ing, and in such a manner as to render its supernatural- 
ism somewhat naturalistic, just as it has shown religion 
that the idea of mystery, upon which religion has placed 
such emphasis, should be relegated to the totality of the 
world rather than to special facts, as the origin of 
motion, the origin of life, and the origin of conscious- 
ness. With its system of values, religion should not 
seek to settle questions of physics, biology, or psychol- 



yS THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ogy. Science had learned how to explain the particular, 
so that it was for religion to exercise its sway over the 
general ; in the circle of the particular, where science 
was able to discover facts and to arrange them in order, 
no criticism of insufficiency could come from the camp 
of religion. Science has taught religion to entertain 
larger and more complex ideas, so that the physics of 
the seventeenth century and the physiology of the nine- 
teenth have had the effect of making the ideas of God 
and the soul less and less the subject of hurried dog- 
matism. Thus it has been brought to the attention of 
religion that the idea of God cannot be entertained sat- 
isfactorily unless one view the world in the largesse of 
modern astronomy and physics, while the idea of the 
soul cannot be appreciated until one has settled accounts 
with the system of evolution. Science has indeed been 
the friend of religion in that science has presented it 
with newer and fuller ideas of the world and the soul. 
If science had been content to remain mere science, 
there had been little complaint on the part of religion, 
even when religion found it difficult to adjust its system 
of spiritual values to the new worlds of matter and life. 
But, while in most cases the scientist was only the 
investigator and organizer of physical data, there were 
striking examples of the scientist as philosopher and 
religionist. The older form of the conflict between the 
two forms of culture busied itself with the destructive 
inferences which, coming from science, seemed to make 
against religious dogmatism; but now it appears that 
science sought to rival religion and thus to produce a 
religion of its own. For this reason, the conflict at 
hand had to do, first, with the opposition of science to 
religion, then, with the substitution of science for re- 
ligion. The appreciation of this twofold situation has 
recently been given by Boutroux, in his Science et Re- 
ligion; according to Boutroux, the ultimate aim of 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 



79 



Comte, Spencer, and Haeckel was to bring about a 
synthesis of science and religion, since religion did not 
fail to command their interest and respect. 22 It was at 
this point that science, from having been the enemy of 
religion, turned to being its friend, and it was from 
such friendship that religion now prays for deliverance. 

At the point where science lays hold of the religious 
problem as such, religion comes forward with its criti- 
cism that science does not satisfy, that science has not 
kept its promise. As long as science had to do with the 
physical world of facts, it was impossible for religion 
to present any claims of dissatisfaction; but when sci- 
ence entered the human world of values, and sought to 
account for and content human needs, the criticism 
could only be forthcoming. When science assumed the 
form of a frank atheism and materialism, when it re- 
garded the physical world as all, religion could retreat 
within to the soul and still indulge its needs and seek 
its own values; but when science followed religion into 
the privacy of its spiritual life, and under the guise of 
friendship, expressed its own need of religious faith, 
the situation became altered, for value confronted value, 
where previously value had confronted the factum bru- 
tum of physics and biology. Religion could indeed point 
out that science itself seemed to stand in need of re- 
ligion ; but, while this need was recognized and duly 
credited, the satisfaction of it by the Religion of Science 
brought about the claim of scientific failure. 

The synthesis of science and religion, as this was 
attempted under the name of the religion of science, 
received different forms of treatment in the hands of 
Comte, Spencer, and Haeckel; but the motive was ever 
the same. All three thinkers endeavored to unite the 
sensuous and spiritual in human life; all three sought 
to develop something more than physical principles as 

23 Science and Beligion, tr. Nield, 173. 



80 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

they took up the question of human needs. With Comte 
was witnessed the synthesis of the natural and spiritual 
in the idea of humanity in which both the objective and 
subjective seem to unite. At first, this desire to super- 
sede the purely scientific appeared in connection with 
the ethical idea of society, while the completion of 
Comte's doctrine found him exalting the religion of 
humanity in which one was supposed to find a sub- 
stitute for the idea of God and belief in the immortality 
of the soul. With Spencer, the synthesis of science 
and religion found expression in the idea of the Un- 
knowable; whereas, at first, the motive for introducing 
this notion was to remove religion from the field of 
science, the final form of the Synthetic Philosophy 
found its author striving to make positive use of the 
postulate as the basis of belief. In the case of Haeckel, 
Monism was supposed to unite science and religion; 
the assumption that the One is immanent in the world 
and the hypothesis that mind and matter ever pursue 
a parallelism there, seemed to Haeckel to do justice to 
the scientific conception of the world and the religious 
estimate of life. From the standpoint of the world, 
the principle of creation may be regarded as inhabiting 
the universe in a manner wholly in accord with the 
principles of naturalistic evolution, while the same pan- 
theistic notion may be regarded as sufficient for the 
religious needs of man, who seeks in the world the True, 
the Beautiful, the Good. Starting with the monism of 
Spinoza, Haeckel thus strives to effect a synthesis 'of 
Goethe's idealism and Darwin's realism, although, as 
Boutroux points out, Haeckel compares rather than 
unites these thinkers. 23 For religion, there remains the 
question whether the ideals of Humanity, the Unknow- 
able, and the One may be accepted as substitutes for 
the traditional notions of God and the self. 

21 Science and Religion, 158. 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 8 1 

In analyzing the world, which religion, had ever re- 
ceived in a manner at once naive and dogmatic, the 
work of science cannot be impugned, while it may also 
be pointed out that, as science has increased the field 
of knowledge, it has also tended to deepen the mystery 
of existence. In addition to this, science has applied 
its principles to the physical life of man in such a way 
as to make it more productive, while it has not failed 
to remove many a human ill ; to this fact, economics and 
medicine cannot fail to bear witness. It may of course 
be pointed out, in opposition to this, that, in the instance 
of the production of wealth, the application of science 
to industry has been accompanied by the painfully un- 
equal distribution of wealth, so that the workingman, 
who has often opposed the introduction of scientific 
machinery into the field of labor, might perhaps oppose 
the statement that science has been the means of ren- 
dering physical life more valuable. Yet it is a question 
whether the sins of a capitalism which has made this 
use of scientific principles can be laid to the door of 
science itself; at the same time, it is a warning against 
a hasty generalization concerning the benefits of scien- 
tific progress, which, from one cause or another, has 
been the actual means of industrial discontent. It is 
in connection with the problem of life- values that the 
claims of science have to be met; it is in the realm of 
the idealistic that we must raise the question whether 
science has satisfied mankind. 

In discussing the question whether the religion of 
science can be entertained by the individual, we must 
consider what it is that man seeks when his religious 
consciousness has sway over him. Thus far, in order 
to distinguish religion from science, we have identified 
religion in a Ritschlian manner as an affair of values. 
Adopting this notion from Kant, Ritschl was not un- 
mindful of what Schleiermacher had done to emancipate 



82 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the religious consciousness, even where he may not have 
seen fit to lay emphasis upon the latter's idea of need. 
Now, man elaborates values because he feels the need 
of these, so that the psychology of need and the ethics 
of worth are both at work upon the human will when 
man seeks the consolations of religion. But, in his need 
of spiritual values, man cannot be satisfied with the 
interpretation of worth as that which is socially useful, 
and it is doubtful whether science can supply man with 
anything superior to or more profound than the prin- 
ciple of utility. It is true that the idea of utility rises 
higher than that of mere fact, but it does not involve 
enough to constitute it an essential value for the relig- 
ious consciousness. When, therefore, science holds out 
promises, science is unable to redeem these, except upon 
the basis of a utility which makes the life of the indi- 
vidual more satisfactory, the existence of the race more 
nearly human. Man's need of values, then, must be 
satisfied in some more substantial manner. 

The place where, if nowhere else, science and religion 
must part company is to be found in connection with 
the idea of pessimism; for it is the recognition of a 
fundamental ill which has been the source of religion. 
Religion was born in pain; it makes its appeal to man's 
sense of sorrow and sin, so that the slight inspiration 
and amelioration of science cannot hope to supply relig- 
ious satisfaction. The failure of science comes out 
most clearly in the midst of this pessimistic outlook 
upon life, where man is possessed of the feeling that he 
can do nothing worthy, where he further feels that life 
cannot bring him peace. Religion has rashly assumed 
the world to be the place of perfect order, but has made 
room for chaos and contradiction in the midst of which 
the whole creation seemed to groan as it waited for the 
redemption of man's body. In its strong pessimism, 
religion has, at times, been ready to consider the world 



THE NATURALIZATION OF LIFE 83 

as though it were under the sway of some malignant 
power, as Dionysius, Satan, or the blind to Will-to-live, 
so that the artless optimism of a scientific faith which 
proceeds to postulate a supreme Humanity, a bland 
Unknowable, or a naive One, has not gained the sym- 
pathy of those who felt that it was a terrible thing to 
fall into the hands of the living God. Thus, it has not 
been the idealizing of the world or the amelioration of 
man's condition therein that has appealed to religion as 
being fundamental and imperative; rather has it been 
the feeling that human self stood in need of complete 
redemption from the world. 

In the naturalization of life, which has ignored art, 
lowered the tone of morality, and tainted religion, the 
individual has been no passive spectator; the individual 
has clung to its impressions, its initiatives, its strivings, 
which it has elaborated in a manner peculiar to itself. 
The individual of the Enlightenment came forth with 
its solipsism and Satanism; but it was the egoistic revolt 
of the nineteenth century which was to display the force 
of an aroused consciousness of selfhood. When once 
the importance of that egoism has been appreciated, it 
will be seen that the time has come for a higher syn- 
thesis of nature than scientism has been able to afford. 
Before this can be done, we must appreciate the degree 
to which anti-natural egoism has gone; and he who 
would observe the effect which an aroused art, moral- 
ity, and religion can produce, must be prepared to wit- 
ness the work of these in their excesses, as these appear 
in decadent aestheticism, pessimistic immoralism, and 
irrationalistic irreligion. To explain these extrava- 
gant tendencies, which are so firmly intrenched in the 
culture of the nineteenth century, one must not fail to 
recall with what contempt for the human self the ego 
was driven to the wall; then the violence of the indi- 
vidualistic revolt will be understood. 



PART TWO 
THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 

WITH the establishment of naturalism as a 
doctrine of life, the claims of humanism 
were found to be such that they could not 
be ignored; but the general recognition of human life 
as a fact cannot be accepted as a complete and detailed 
doctrine of individualism. On this account, it becomes 
necessary to inquire just what individualism is supposed 
to be; for, where modern thought has been most assid- 
uous in seeking the forms and causes which obtain in 
nature, it has not been so ready to inquire what " being 
one's self " really means. The method of research which 
the course of nineteenth century individualism has fol- 
lowed, makes possible a threefold formulation of the 
individualistic problem upon the basis of sense, volition, 
and thought. The human self is an " I think," an " I 
will," an " I am " ; for this reason, we must follow the 
dictates of an aestheticism which presents egoism as a 
fact of immediate existence, immoralism which asserts 
the right of the individualistic initiative, and irreligion, 
in which the affirmation of the self assumes its most 
strident form. In all three of these, the individualist 
must be prepared for the expression of egoism in an 
exaggerated form ; and, should he be tempted to feel 
that his individualism, his doctrine, has been expressed 
morbidly or viciously, let him not forget how relent- 
lessly scientism has sought to eliminate the human self 
from the world. Then the exaggerations of egoism, as 
these appear in art, ethics, and religion, will seem at 
once explicable and justifiable. The aesthetic self of 
antiquity and the religious soul of mediaevalism were 
easily overcome by the naturalistic influences of modern 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 85 

thought; the egoism of the nineteenth century, however, 
may present a more determined attitude on the part of 
spiritual life. It is as an antidote for naturalism that 
we present the excessive egoism of the day. 

The individualist, or egoist, of the present-day is quite 
different from the alleged egoist of the Enlightenment ; 
then, in the earlier period, man was in the habit of 
taking himself for granted, an assumption which deliv- 
ered him from the painful necessity of exerting the 
will-to-selfhood, just as it made it unnecessary for him 
to adopt an inimical attitude toward the social order. 
Hobbes was one thing; Stirner is another: call both 
" egoists " and they will be found to take their respect- 
ive stands at opposite poles. In the earlier period, when 
selfhood was the grand assumption, the method of de- 
ducing selfhood from life consisted in making instinctive 
appeal to either the principle of rights or the principle 
of pleasure. Hobbes was involved in both the juristic 
and hedonistic methods of egoism; Rousseau had the 
good fortune to present the egoism of rights and pleas- 
ure in a more pleasing, more plausible manner. The 
egoism of the Enlightenment was held in by the En- 
lightenment's peculiar fondness for " reason," reason as 
the guide of intellect, reason as the motive for the will. 
As a result, the individualism of the earlier period of 
modern thought did not see fit or find it necessary to 
resort to those extreme measures of irrationalism which, 
in the age of culture which was to come, have had the 
effect of giving egoism a new form; that is, the only 
sincere form it has ever received. Draw about the 
striving ego the large circle of " reason," and it may 
not appear necessary to repudiate the concept under 
which the self is subsumed as a specimen under a spe- 
cies. But conceive of " reason " in the narrower and 
more definite forms of scientism and sociality whence 
thinking becomes exact and action altruistic, and the 



86 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

robust ego is likely to revolt. This indeed has been the 
wilful fate of the ego in the age of culture; his irration- 
alism has assumed the form of anti-scientism, his im- 
moralism appears in the guise of anti-social ethics. By 
means of this revolt against the metaphysical and moral 
standards of the age, the egoist " arrived " ; as arrivist, 
he takes his stand, not against nature as such, but against 
naturalism, as the shaping of nature in the school of 
scientism. 

One may be able to come to something like an under- 
standing with the genuine individualist if one keeps in 
mind that objective system of things and persons, called 
respectively science and society, which to the egoist 
seems to stand in the way of free inward existence and 
full self-expression. As a revolt against exteriorizing 
agencies, egoism is none the less a repugnance for the 
petty egoism of the earlier age; for the one, egoism has 
enmity; for the other it has no friendship. Thus, the 
individualism of the present age is unique; it is no more 
the old " egoism " than it is the old altruism. This 
unique egoism, ranging from Emerson and Stirner to 
Ibsen and Dostoievsky, is forced to assume that the path 
to personality is more difficult than the path to social 
existence. " It is not easy to be human," says the 
Daughter of Indra in Strindberg's The Dream Play; 1 
when one realizes that to be human may mean to be 
individual, the task of life appears even more than diffi- 
cult. In spite of the difficulty which makes individual- 
ism appear unusually forbidding, the egoistic philosophy 
of the nineteenth century did not fail to indicate certain 
definite methods calculated to lead to the individualistic 
goal. In the Struggle for Selfhood, the conflict between 
the naturalistic and the individualistic led to (i) The 
Struggle for the Joy of Life, which ended in Aestheti- 
cism; (2) The Struggle for the Worth of Life, which 

5 Tr. Bjorkman, 100. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 87 

culminated in Immoralism; and (3) The Struggle for 
the Truth of Life, whose result was Irrationalism and 
Irreligion. 

I. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE JOY OF LIFE 

Whereas the more consistent treatment of eudae- 
monistic egoism belongs by rights to the question con- 
cerning Selfhood in Society, the supremacy of the self 
over nature is to be shown by means of an analysis of 
consciousness according to which the freedom of soul- 
states will be found to depend upon the ego's ability 
to enjoy them. When the conscious state is inwardly 
enjoyed and duly appreciated, it becomes difficult for 
philosophy of life, if it be so desirous, to relegate the 
soul-state to the purely natural order; for this reason, 
individualism has not failed to make use of the joy of 
life as an argument against the domination of the self 
from without. Where naturalism looks upon every soul- 
state, that of joy included, as something for which the 
physical world is responsible, individualism calls atten- 
tion to the fact that man's joys are his own, because he 
has made them his own. While man never disconnects 
his life from the natural order, he still has it within his 
power to withdraw from the world and thus relish the 
soul-state as that which belongs to his inner life. It is 
undeniable that the inner life may make use of volition 
and cognition to assert the independence of the self, yet 
the aesthetic appreciation of soul-states is not without 
value in preparing the way for such more conclusive 
convictions; at the same time, eudaemonism as a means 
of individualism is of intrinsic worth. " Are we that 
which is within us ? " asks Stirner. 2 To this query indi- 
vidualism responds by saying, " No, we are not by nature 
that which is or goes on within us; but, by means of 

2 The Ego and His Own, tr. Byington, 40. 



8.8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

inward enjoyment, we are able to become ourselves." 
Hence, the inward enjoyment of life is a superior and 
appropriate means of realizing life's implicit inwardness. 
Inward enjoyment, far from being something purely 
desiderative, is a dialectical matter according to which 
inward existence is found. 

i. The; Inward Enjoyment of Life 

In the attempt to secure the independence of the soul- 
state, decadent individualism made use of an aesthetic 
method which might seem to mask the individualistic 
issue and taint the truthfulness of its plea. That which 
the self seeks, far from being the light enjoyment of 
the soul-state as such, consists rather in the inward 
realization of this state as that which is characteristic 
of the inner life. Such eudaemonism, while not the 
supreme contention of the self for the self, is indicative 
of a condition without which the self could hardly be 
said to exist, so that the claim for the joy of life is 
much sterner than the ideal of private felicity might 
seem to show. Naturalism wishes its creature to be 
healthy and efficient; humanism protests that man must 
have been meant for joy, else why this capacity for hap- 
piness? Hedonism has made the progress of humanism 
slow and uncertain, since hedonism taking its stand upon 
the idea of pleasure, was in no position to effect a philo- 
sophy of life. Pleasure, which comes and goes like 
sensation, cannot arch over the life of the self, cannot 
supply beneath a ground for human existence; happi- 
ness shows its ability and right to serve as a life-ideal, 
inasmuch as happiness is an intellectual affair based 
upon judgment, from which the individual may con- 
clude whether life is joyous or in vain. The distinction 
between the hedonic and eudaemonistic, their respective 
values and validities, appear when it is noted that sci- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 89 

entism is barely able to postulate pleasure as a life-ideal, 
while aestheticism makes no use of the hedonic prin- 
ciple at all. The contrast between the traditional ideal 
of pleasure and the individualistic ideal of joy may be 
more clearly seen when it is noted that pleasure is 
restricted to some phase of man's life, where joy is 
relegated to his life in its totality. Furthermore, pleas- 
ure is an experience which man shares with the higher 
animals, while joy is an experience purely human in its 
character. Eudaemonism thus postulates the ideal of 
the enjoyment of existence as such, for the experiencing 
of which a view of the world as a whole and a con- 
ception of life in its unity are essential principles. For 
this reason, the aesthetico-eudaemonistic ideal has the 
power to determine the destiny of humanity. 

When happiness is placed upon its proper foundation 
in the life of the spiritual self, it becomes capable of 
acting as an interpreter of man's relation to the world, 
whence arises a eudaemonistic metaphysics. In sci- 
entism, the sole sense of satisfaction is limited to that 
agreeable feeling which comes from the perfect func- 
tion of some organ, whereby pleasure acts in a biological 
manner to increase the sense of vitality and make activ- 
ity more energetic and effectual. In the progress from 
hedonism to social evolution, pleasure lost what little 
sense of idealism it had been able to acquire; no longer 
is it pleasure, but benefit; no longer pain, but injury. 
When hedonism thus passed into the hands of biological 
ethics in order to become scientific, it surrendered its 
right to pose as a philosophy of life, so that the eudae- 
monistic claim, as this is put forward by aestheticism, 
represents the only argument upon which the joy of 
life may be presented. If, therefore, man has a destiny, 
the latter must be evinced upon eudaemonistic grounds, 
for science seems determined that man shall live with- 
out the consciousness of happiness. 



90 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



The larger philosophies of the world have not dis- 
dained the support which may be drawn from eudae- 
monistic sources. As an example of such eudaemonistic 
wisdom, we can do no better than appeal to the Khan- 
do gya-U panishad of Vedanta, wherein is found that 
root principle of Aryan idealism, the Tat tvam asi. 
The Vedantist, however, is not content with the formal 
enunciation of his idealism, as this finds expression in 
contemplation, whence he says, " That which is the 
subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the 
True. It is the Self, and thou art it." 3 The eudae- 
monistic is appended to the intellectualistic in the fol- 
lowing manner : " He who desires the world of per- 
fumes- and of garlands, by his mere will, perfumes and 
garlands come to him, and having obtained the world 
of perfumes and garlands, he is happy." This eudae- 
monism is none the less applicable to the " world of 
friends," the " world of women," and the " world of 
song and music." 4 Without this eudaemonistic pos- 
tulate, it would seem impossible for the Vedantist to 
have elaborated his spiritual life-ideal. 

The Aristotelian philosophy furnishes individualism 
with a similar argument, whence he may conclude that, 
since man is happy, he has a destiny in the world. In 
his endeavor to solve the problem of happiness, Aris- 
totle found it necessary to abandon the hedonic for the 
eudaemonistic, while the eudaemonistic is itself sup- 
ported by the intellectualistic. From pleasure in its 
instantaneous and sensuous form, Aristotle turns to the 
sense of continuity which comes from activity, 5 while 
he concludes that the highest kind of energy is that of 
contemplation. " If from a living being you take away 
action . . . what remains but contemplation? . . . 

3 Op. cit., VI, 8, 7, etc. 

i/6., VIII, 2, 2. 

c Ethics, X, Ch. III-IV. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 



9 1 



Happiness then is coextensive with this contemplative 
speculation, and in proportion as people have the act of 
contemplation, so far have they also the being happy." 6 
Having made enjoyment and contemplation coextensive, 
the Aristotelian ethics indicates that, as happiness is 
based upon knowledge, so knowledge is incomplete apart 
from happiness, from which we may draw the con- 
clusion that the power to contemplate the world-whole, 
after the manner of a Greek god, depends, not upon 
knowledge alone, but upon enjoyment also. 

Such eudaemonism may be accepted as one of the 
means by which the individual may assure himself of 
his destiny in the world; so much enjoyment, so much 
genuine existence. The modern, who has been experi- 
menting with the problem of living and thinking with- 
out entertaining a view of the world as a whole, has 
added to his cares by attempting the equally arduous 
task of living without happiness. Scientism has assumed 
that man is willing to forego both contemplation and 
enjoyment, so that the individual who believes in the 
inner life has been forced to turn to the aesthetical, 
where both vision and enjoyment are attributed to the 
human mind. For this reason, the truth and sufficiency 
of scientism can only be called in question by all those 
who believe that man was destined to be great, while 
they feel free to inquire why it is that the world and 
humanity seem less and less august the more and more 
the mind advances in the physical and psychological. 
We know more than the Greeks, but we see less; we 
have more perfect means of insight and enjoyment, but 
we have less intellectual satisfaction. Does the fault lie 
in the object of thought, whether man or the world, or 
does it lie in the inferiority of the motive and method 
which guide our investigations? Must we assume that 
the world is used up and that the mind is exhausted of 

a Ih., Ch. VI. 



92 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



all its resources, or may we not rather assume that we 
have gotten into the habit of assuming a low standard 
of thinking and living? Where Aristotle's ethics place 
man by the side of the gods, our ethics uses its biolog- 
ical methods to relate man to the lower animals. No 
wonder then that we have lost the sense of destiny which 
a eudaemonistic philosophy is ever ready to impart, and 
no wonder that the individualistic movement feels called 
upon to make use of extravagant methods in order to 
restate the claims of man's interior existence. 

Does it not seem, then, that the day of psychology is 
either passed or passing? How long can human life 
endure the drab description of its inner soul-states? 
The individualist may be willing to admit that the De- 
cadent has overshot the mark in his morbid attempt to 
evoke by artificial means and with factitious ideals those 
soul-states which are once or twice removed from the 
possibilities of the actual life of the self within; but is 
the scientist, with his naturalistic criteria, any nearer 
the truth of the inner life? Aestheticism, with its norm 
of art for art's sake, may have a certain morbidness 
about it; but scientism, with its maxim, science for 
science's sake, is no freer from this same morbidity. 
Somewhere between the aesthetic and the scientific, the 
essential character of the soul-state may be found; but 
just as long as our culture persists in employing the 
scientific as the sole means of securing insight into the 
inner life, just so long is aestheticism justified in up- 
holding its exaggerated ideals of what that inner life 
may be thought to be : as a check to scientism, the 
validity of aestheticism cannot be impugned. Such 
aestheticism differs from mere hedonism in that aesthe- 
ticism makes man the creator and ruler of his own 
soul-states, where psychological hedonism expects man 
to do no more than experience them. That which places 
the joy of life and the realization of life upon the same 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 93 

spiritual plane is the truth that both are the result of 
striving on the part of the self, while both are due to 
that quickening of the intellect whereby the self and its 
joys are realized. Schlegel sought to give expression to 
a similar idea when he placed his Lucinde in a world 
of her own aesthetic creation as that which was selbst- 
gedachten, selbstgebildeten; 7 in such a self- world, one is 
able to experience essential joy, Genusss einer schonen 
Gegenwart. 

Genuine introspection has the effect of showing that 
the mind is possessed of a characteristic content which 
can never be identified by marking the formal outline 
of that which scientific psychology is able to identify. 
Reposing in the midst of the opposed forces of cog- 
nition and conation, feeling shows itself to be not mere 
reception of impressions from without or reaction of 
impulses from within, but an essential experiencing of 
that which is inward and intimate. All that takes place 
in the experience of emotion is internal; for, while feel- 
ing may suggest some degree of objective expression- 
ism, as this was the fashion with Romanticism, emotion 
involves no violation of that which is within. Con- 
sciousness thus makes possible an egoism of emotion; 
and it was this possibility which was realized by the 
romantic school. Earlier egoism, as this appeared in 
the Enlightenment, failed to develop the content of 
inner life, although in the mingled rationalism and Ro- 
manticism of Rousseau a genuine beginning was made. 

The new egoism became aesthetical when Kant placed 
judgments of feeling upon the same plane as logical 
and moral propositions ; as Kant himself was thus able 
to ground his own aesthetic as a science, the roman- 
ticists were enabled to urge aestheticism as a form of 
life-philosophy. The stolid self-seeking of the Hobbist 
ego stood out in unfavorable contrast to the cultivated 

7 Lucinde, ed. Reclam, 61. 



94 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



self-realization of Schlegel's " self," an ego which was 
above all else selbsigebildet. In place of material self- 
enjoyment, the aesthetic ego of Romanticism showed 
itself in das rastlose Streben nach dem Neuen, Piquan- 
ten, und Frappanten. 8 Where selfhood had not been 
found in sense, it began to clothe itself in the form of 
aesthetics; the superiority of the emotional, however 
imperfect such a form of life may be, appeared in the 
tendency to internalize life and thrust it out toward a 
remote object. 

Although naturalization of life has appeared to inter- 
act with the older theories, especially in the instance of 
hedonism, it is a mistake to suppose that much sem- 
blance of the original ideals remains. In certain re- 
spects, the principles of social evolution are as thor- 
oughly opposed to the eudaemonistic as they are inimical 
to the rigoristic; and it may further be suggested that, 
where one follows the maxims of rationalistic morality, 
one is even nearer the social kingdom than is the man 
whose ideal is that of private happiness. Darwin was 
attracted by the " imperious word ' ought '," but he 
says nothing in favor of the joy of living. Thus it may 
be said that, however much the social and rigoristic 
thinkers differ in their speculative conception of man- 
kind, they are well nigh agreed that the individual must 
pursue an ethic which shall forbid his seeking his own in 
the world. On the other hand, with all the speculative 
agreement of a hedonism which reposes in the sensuous 
nature of humanity and a social ideal couched in terms 
of naturalism, there is still a wide chasm between the 
life-ideals which the two empirical morales propose. 
Just as it is the artistic mind which protests against the 
encroachments and invasions of social thinking, so it is 
the eudaemonistic moralist who upholds the anti-social 
revolt. Here occurs a trans-moralization which renders 
the humanistic situation more than usually complex. 

8 Jugend Seriften, ed. Minor, Bd. I, 95. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 95 

The egoistic revolt is thus a eudaemonistic revolt. 
To socialize and subdue the rigorist who never once 
thought to postulate his own happiness as the goal of 
his terrible moral striving, is an easy task compared 
with the attempt to ensnare the eudaemonist who looked 
upon the world as the place of joy rather than a scene 
of social service. Owing to this contradiction, some 
who were once affiliated with the rigoristic school have 
been forced to assume a eudaemonistic position in order 
to escape the trap prepared in the sight of the bird; 
but certain rigorists, despairing of life, and on the point 
of relinquishing their all to they knew not what, found 
in the cool social ideal an escape from the inner life 
which had seemed so terrible in its aspects. It was in 
this manner that Schopenhauer, whose system was all 
but one of Pan-Satanism, tended to effect a pathway 
out of life, not altogether by the " renunciation of the 
will-to-live," but by a system of sympathism, which was 
not unlike the more moderate principles of our omni- 
present social system. " You cannot live ; you have no 
place in the world; hence you must relinquish all," the 
rigorist seemed to say. " But, relinquish to what ? " 
questioned the renunciationist. " To humanity," was 
the answer. Where the life-ideal is eudaemonistic, 
however, the individual is not so ready to relinquish 
because he has so much at stake. 

The eudaemonistic character of the egoistic revolt 
appears repeatedly in the decadent drama, where so 
much is said about one's self. There are sterner meth- 
ods of egoism to be sure; but the eudaemonistic method 
is usually the one appealed to when the revolting ego 
sets his face against society. With Ibsen, severe as was 
this moralist, the eudaemonistic appeal is ever forth- 
coming. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving seeks to illuminate the 
terrific character of a social situation which cast her 
into the abyss of nihilism by explaining that her dis- 



96 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

solute husband had not known joy, work, or comrade- 
ship, while her ill-starred son, Oswald, seeks in the joie 
de vivre redemption from the curse he had inherited. 9 
Where the Ibsenesque egoist seeks to spread his doc- 
trine abroad, he can find no other means of ennobling 
human souls, as Rosmer fain would have done, except 
as he plants in them the ennoblement which comes from 
happiness. 10 In the same manner, the sombre character 
of the play John Gabriel Borkman is lighted up with the 
eudaemonism of the hero's son, Erhart, who turns from 
work to joy, from personal responsibility to self-realiz- 
ation. 

The impotence of duty and the power of joy further 
appear in the post-Ibsen drama of Hauptmann and 
Sudermann. The eudaemonism of Sudermann, far more 
marked than that of his master Ibsen, is likewise char- 
acterized by a more vivid spirit of revolution, so that 
one might say that the greater the eudaemonism, the 
greater the egoism. The hero in Dame Care, most 
dutiful and obedient as he was, failed of self-realization 
until, emancipating himself through crime, he found the 
joy of living. The Pastor in Mag da fails to rise to the 
superb egoism of the heroine, not because he lacked 
strength and sincerity, but because he had no capacity 
for happiness. Thus he addresses himself to Magda, 
and says, " As you stood before me yesterday in your 
freshness, your natural strength, your — your greatness, 
I said to myself, ' That is what you might have been if 
at the right moment joy had entered into your life.' " %1 
Where Sudermann' s later works are found to contain 
a free eudaemonism, which masks the strong egoistic 
features of his art, the interconnection of the two human 
ideals is never lost to view. Hauptmann, less versatile 

9 Ghosts, Act III. 

19 Bosmersholm, Act. II. 

« Op. cit., Act. III. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 97 

and wanting in the vigor of his colleague, has been as 
successful in his synthesis of pleasure and personality. 
In The Sunken Bell, the Bell Founder can perform his 
new work only as he feels new joy; there is strength 
in his arm only because love has poured itself like wine 
into his veins; pleasure has become power. 12 

To become that which is within, that is the most 
definite aim of eudaemonistic egoism. In contrast with 
such an intimate notion, the half-hearted egoism of the 
Enlightenment sinks into obscurity. Then, under the 
auspices of both rationalism and materialism, the indi- 
vidual said, " I am myself, and I love myself," but he 
said it with hesitation and shame. When nineteenth- 
century individualism awakens to the pathetic fact that 
the ego is not itself and does not enjoy its own inner 
existence, self-existence through self -enjoyment becomes 
the goal of all egoistic striving. At last it is seen that 
man cannot be himself by means of a mere " I am I " 
and " I love me " ; nevertheless, the sense of self-enjoy- 
ment is looked to as a means of arriving at self-exist- 
ence. The states of the soul must be saved from an 
impersonal scientific psychology which assumes no meta- 
physical responsibility for the human self; these soul- 
states are to be saved eudaemonistically, according to 
the presupposition that that which enjoys its inner being 
likewise possesses the existence of its inner being. 

2. The; Independence oe Soue-States 

Given a soul-state, whose existence cannot be doubted 
even by skepticism itself, it seems as though the unum 
necessarium consists in working outward toward the 
object of knowledge. Is it not equally necessary to 
work inward toward the subject of knowledge? The 
exteriorization of knowledge, upon which philosophy 

u Op. cit., Act. III. 



98 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

insists, is an impulse which traces back to the seven- 
teenth century when, sure of the self, the thinker was 
anxious to become equally sure of the world. The 
interiorization of the self is a movement peculiar to the 
nineteenth century, when the individualist, all too cer- 
tain of the existence of the world, longed to attribute 
some kind or degree of reality to that which goes on 
within. The object has proved its existence beyond all 
possibility of doubt, so that now we are sure that things 
exist; but the subject has yet. to prove its own existence, 
so that it may show that thoughts exist. For this reason, 
the soul-state must proceed outwards toward the world, 
while it must recede inwards toward the self; to be a 
mere state of consciousness which sheds light upon 
things is not sufficient ; the soul-state must radiate in 
the other direction, and thus shed light upon the self. 
To continue the argument for objectivism is to carry 
coals to Newcastle; these coals might better be burned 
in their own fires of subjectivism, where they are 
needed. 

How often must it be repeated that the eighteenth 
century has long since passed away, and with it the 
naive egoism which did have the strength or the will 
to assert itself? How often must we remind ourselves 
that the nineteenth century came to place the self upon 
its real foundation, in joy and worth and truth? Beel- 
zebub has cast out Beelzebub; the self of the Enlight- 
enment cast out the Enlightenment's ego, so that the 
beginning of the nineteenth century saw man selfless, 
save as there remained the impulse toward selfhood, as 
this was felt by Fichte and, after him, by the individ- 
ualistic school. Why, then, should one take his own 
soul-states in all their significance and preciousness and 
cast them to the objective order of things, as so many 
pearls before swine? Once it was said, All that is in 
the mind is mental, simply because it is in the mind; 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 99 

now it is said, All that is in the mind is physical, a 
" psychosis " whose only meaning is to be found in its 
relation to the physical order. Give the Devil enough 
rope and he will hang himself; give the psychologist 
enough psychosis and he will strangle his own soul. 
From this peril of selflessness, Descartes cannot save 
us, for we are beyond that redemption which can come 
from a mere cogito, ergo sum; in place of the rational- 
istic, optimistic Descartes, the individualist appeals to 
other Gallic minds, to the Decadents and Symbolists, 
who see how pathetic is their selflessness, and who, 
like Samain and Rette, like Morice and Gustav Kahn, 
like Verhaeren and Rodenbach, insist upon the self 
within, when they refer to mon ame and moi-meme. 
What had become of soul-states if the Decadents and 
Symbolists had not come to deliver the soul from psy- 
chology and sociology? 

Psychology without a soul and sociology without a 
self, these are the delicious products of our scientism. 
In justice to these amiable forms of modern scientism, 
it may perhaps be suggested that the ardent devotee of 
psychosis and society had no sufficient conception of the 
self which he was so rashly casting out; the Enlight- 
enment had done no more than the psychological self 
with the abstract soul of Descartes, while it had viewed 
the social self as though it were indeed the stark ego 
of Hobbes. Psychology and sociology was either un- 
able or unwilling to realize that the ego of Fichte placed 
its selfhood upon something more forceful than a Car- 
tesian " I think," or that the ego of Stirner was more 
like the real man than the self-loving ego of Hobbes. 
The victory of psychologico-sociological scientism was 
an easy one; such scientism conquered but the enfeebled 
ideas of a past age; when now the soul is the vigorous 
self-asserting thing of individualism and the self an 
equally militant ego in the social order, the psycho- 



IO o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

logical, sociological veto has little authority or power. 
Psychosis is far from being enough to satisfy the de- 
mands of the self which has the psychosis; the soul- 
state is itself possessed of a content which demands 
consistent treatment; the soul-state has essence, char- 
acter, and inward meaning. 

The individual insistence upon the inward enjoyment 
of life, far from being eudaemonistic, concerned itself 
with the very existence of the self. Here, perhaps, is 
another place where the earlier individualism is to be 
differentiated from the later form of the doctrine. 
Earlier egoism, which was individualistic in name only, 
interpreted pleasure in the purely hedonic sense of felt 
enjoyment; pleasure was thus the end of the individual's 
life. The egoism of the day, while not rigoristic, is 
not primarily concerned with the soul-state as that 
which gives enjoyment but as that which, by means of 
the enjoyment, gives assurance that there is, within the 
pleasurable experience, a self to which that experience 
belongs. The simple word " enjoy " has more than one 
meaning; to enjoy may mean taking pleasure in, or it 
may signify to possess. Where one form of egoism 
was content to regard enjoyment as that which meant 
pleasure, the other expression of the doctrine lays its 
emphasis upon the possession of that which is felt. 
When this distinction is applied to the soul-state, it is 
no longer the mere luxuriating in a pleasure which one 
may feel, but the possession of the soul-state which 
contains the pleasure ; it is the " ownness," or elgen- 
thum, of Stirner. In connection with that which goes 
on within, the individual is not satisfied with the mere 
taking pleasure in, but the taking possession of, a soul- 
state: such is the basis of the individualist's plea for 
the soul state. 

The individual desires to call his soul his own; 
according to scientism, this soul is so much psychosis 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD ioi 

or so much sociality. For the possession of one's own 
soul-states, it is necessary to have something more than 
either consciousness or self-consciousness. Mere con- 
sciousness is so much psychosis, and, as such, it does 
not belong to the ego which experiences it; self-con- 
sciousness, while more promising, yields no more than 
the consciousness of the ego as that of one element 
among others. Although the first among equals, the 
self-conscious ego may exercise no right of eminent 
domain over that which goes on within him. Let it be 
said that these soul-states have to do with things which 
exist in the exterior order ; let it further be claimed that 
the self must share them with others of his kind; and 
it may still be asserted that they have their own mean- 
ing for him whose they are and whom they serve. To 
suffer the intimate soul-state to exhaust itself physically 
upon things and socially upon others, without allowing 
it to sustain some genuine meaning to him who experi- 
ences it, is to indulge in bad introspection in the course 
of which no meaning of that soul-state is lost. Now, 
the desire to make man's soul-states physical and social, 
without allowing them to be personal, is the one thing 
which scientism has expressed; against this de-person- 
alization, all individualism has protested. 

The method which the individual employs in the pos- 
sessive enjoyment of his soul-states is not the same as 
the psychological function of attention, yet that func- 
tion may serve as an example of the manner in which 
the self secures its own states. When states of con- 
sciousness are nothing more than such psychic states, 
it is not difficult for the psychologist and sociologist to 
tear them from the self and attach them to the exterior 
order of physicality and sociality; but when the indi- 
vidual fixates these states by attending to them, he gives 
them the stamp of ownership, whence he speaks of them 
as his own. The changes which take place in conscious- 



102 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ness, instead of being like changes of wind and weather 
whose whence and whither are unknown and uncon- 
trolled, are willed changes produced inwardly by the 
self-conscious and selective activity of the self. By 
means of such interior volition, or attention, the ego 
wills itself as self, wills its states as its own. Self- 
consciousness, instead of serving as the mere ratio cog- 
noscendi of Cartesian psychology, is now felt to be the 
ratio fiendi of the self in its internal existence. The 
self makes its own conscious states, some cognitive, 
some volitional, others emotional. 

The character of the conscious state which the self 
has thus evoked is that of inner independence. When 
nature and humanity are rightly conceived, there is 
nothing to forbid the existence and enjoyment of the 
inner state in its full freedom. It is true that he who 
retires within to himself is often led to dread lest he 
so lose contact with the outer world as to be threatened 
with solipsism, while he who retreats from the social 
order is placed in an egoistic position; indeed, some of 
the most pathetic of biographical items are to be found 
in instances of those who, rejoicing in a rich, concrete 
inner life, were unable to adjust that life to the outer 
world, so that they were thrown back upon a kind of 
fancied existence in their own thoughts. But, on the 
other hand, social history is more than full of examples 
where the budding individual, accepting as authoritarian 
the philosophy of an exteriorizing science, has been led 
to despair of any independent existence within, and has 
thus surrendered his selfhood to the world, there to exist 
as one among many other things, while he has relin- 
quished his will to society to function with the other 
forces of the body politic. Since, therefore, individ- 
uality is the exception and society the rule, since nature 
is all but supreme where the individual exists only by 
courtesy, it is wiser to assert that measure of freedom 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 103 

which comes from the conscious state, evoked as this is 
by the rare power of attention. Creatures may swarm 
in deeps which they do not possess ; creatures may crawl 
upon an earth which gives them nought by habitat; 
birds may rise into an atmosphere of their own without 
feeling their superiority; but it is man, man in his indi- 
vidualism, who has the power to possess the world. 

To say, " I think " — that is the first desire ; that, 
the supreme duty of the individual. Upon his ability 
to overcome the aphasia which has inflicted itself upon 
him, depends his destiny as a spirit in the world. In 
order to exercise this right, Descartes had but to remove 
the mediaeval " world " and the mediaeval " God " ; for 
us to accomplish the same result to-day, a more resolute 
act of thought becomes necessary. More difficult as our 
task appears to be, all the more result ful will become 
the accomplishment of it. We shall achieve an individ- 
ualism unknown to the optimistic Enlightenment. The 
first positivistic synthesis which stood in the way of 
free, inner personality was that of monism; this syn- 
thesis has been transcended, so that the way for a new 
view of life is open to us. Monism was forbidding, if 
not fatal, because it aimed to attach, not only the spirit- 
ual to the material, but every expression of the spiritual 
to a corresponding physical state. In this manner, per- 
sonality was subsumed under parallelism, and that to 
such a degree that there was conceived an exact pro- 
portion between the bodily and the mental; so much 
neurosis, so much psychosis. In the light of the paral- 
lelistic hypothesis, psychology sought to make its way 
through the labyrinth of consciousness; the outer took 
the place of inner, the brain ruled the self. To-day, 
however, while monism may still hold out attractions to 
the speculative thinker who desires to reduce all experi- 
ence to some immediate unity, it fails to convince the 
psychologist of its practical worth as a working hypo- 



104 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

thesis; and, since it was meant for the psychologist, the 
repudiation of it by him suggests that the complete 
rejection of it can do no harm to the study of con- 
sciousness as such. With the passing of monism, the 
possibility of a free, inner consciousness reappears, 
whence the individualist has the opportunity to reassert 
the independence of the conscious state which once was 
looked upon as nothing but the accompaniment of the 
physical state. 

If the conscious state is in a position to assert its 
freedom, it may be well to inquire concerning what the 
"I think" denotes. With the Enlightenment, the "I 
think " indicated nothing but a form ; with us to-day, 
it should receive a definite content. In order to save 
the conscious state from formal vacuity, it becomes 
necessary to invest it with an appropriate content; this 
can be done immediately and in a manner consistent 
with the nature of the self, if we are ready to super- 
impose upon consciousness in the naturistic sense of the 
term the humanistic idea of conscious culture. Con- 
sciousness does not exhaust its possibilities when it has 
made us aware of the presence of objects, or when 
further it has made it possible for us to react upon 
these ; the " sensory " and "motor " are but the prelim- 
inaries to the conscious " I think " and " I will." In 
psychological " consciousness," we find but the raw 
material for the conscious state in its integrity; the 
inner life is not a nothing, nor is it a creation out of 
nothing. In the animal as also in the man of nature, 
the soul-state is only a possibility, a promise; in man 
as such, the possible state becomes real through the 
application of the self to its own affairs. The culture- 
consciousness, wherein soul-states are elaborated, ex- 
presses itself in a manner both intellectual and volitional, 
while it is further characterized by mental disciplines 
which cultivate the abstract and concrete. The formal 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 105 

disciplines are found in logic and ethics ; the more real 
ones, in art and religion. 

Where consciousness has its roots in sensation, its 
function is not confined to the simple act of noticing 
the sensational qualities which appear when stimulus 
provokes sensation, nor is the activity of consciousness 
limited to the impulses which arise automatically in the 
motor system. The impression becomes idea; the im- 
pulse reappears in volition. Even then, the activity of 
the self, intent as is the mind in producing something 
characteristic and satisfying, does not rest in a mere 
thinking and willing; the self makes these intellectual 
and volitional states its own. Knowledge thus affords 
a view of the world as a whole, while action becomes 
the expression of the soul in its unity. Hence arise the 
" I think " and the " I will " of individualism. Logical 
norms and criteria, ethical standards and values are now 
brought into being as free mental states, at times alien 
to the world whence they sprang, at times antagonistic 
to it. In all this, the self exhibits its characteristic 
nature and its original form, while the conscious state 
has become detached from the habitual train of ideas. 
Give Plato the impression which means so little to 
Protagoras, and he turns it into an idea, while he lifts 
the mind out of the world; give Kant the impulse which 
meant so little to Hobbes, and he transmutes it into 
something autonomous and self-sufficient. The psycho- 
logical becomes spiritual, the conscious cultural. 

In the same manner, humanity delivers itself from the 
native flow of consciousness when it evokes artistic and 
religious motives. The sensations and feelings with 
which nature supplies us, are not left to themselves, but 
are raised above the rank of mere occurrences when the 
aesthetic consciousness, cleansing them of all immediate 
interest, constitutes them as disinterested judgments of 
beauty. Let some Barbizon artist view the landscape, 



106 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

which in itself is but a congeries of sensations, and his 
genius presents to the beholder of his canvas a spiritual 
product whose significance is permanent. In like man- 
ner, the inward feelings and impulses of the soul, which 
seem to be only psychic and subjective, may become 
august and dignified when they are refined in the relig- 
ious consciousness of a Tolstoi and a Huysmans. In 
only a lingering and accidental manner does the culti- 
vated state of the religious consciousness betray its 
origin in the simple conscious state whence it originated. 
The inner, independent activity of the " I think " has 
accomplished that which with the mere creature were 
impossible ; and, by means of this intro-activity, the con- 
tent of the soul-state has become characteristic. 

In which of the two instances, the conscious and the 
cultural, do we find man ? The naturalistic thinker can- 
not accuse individualism of having introduced material 
of its own in the elaboration of the inner life, for the 
humanistic method consists in developing the given con- 
scious state to its proper proportion. On the other hand, 
however, the humanist may accuse the naturalist of 
failing to observe the significance of the mental state 
which his analysis brought to light, just as the humanist 
may further point out that naturalism has been guilty 
of intolerance in forbidding the individualistic interpre- 
tation of consciousness. Where monism has had to lay 
down the cudgel, realism is now engaged in the work 
of forbidding the " I think." But the fact remains that 
humanity is possessed of independent soul-states whose 
adaptability to humanistic development cannot be ques- 
tioned; and it is in the free development of such states 
that individualism reveals its right to exist. If individ- 
ualism is forced to admit that the world does not exist 
for man, he is now in a position where he may assert 
that man does not exist for the world. If the ego does 
not possess the world, it does not fail to possess itself 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 107 

in its " I think," its " I will," its " I am." At the same 
time, individualism does not really admit that it has 
lost its world; for the ego thinks the world, wills the 
world, and, like the world, has a peculiar sense of exist- 
ence. To conclude in a contrary fashion is to repudiate 
human culture ; and human culture seems to have passed 
the point where this repudiation is possible. To arrive 
at the sombre conclusion that man has no world, that 
man is not himself, is quite possible; nevertheless, such 
a conclusion would have to be drawn from more sub- 
stantial premises than science has been able to supply. 

3. The; Rights of Aesthkticism 

To assert the independence of soul-states, whereby 
the intrinsic qualities and values of the inner life are 
conserved, is to arouse a conflict with the spirit of psy- 
chology as this has long been brooding over modern 
philosophy. The question thus becomes a question as 
to the right to analyze the state which the individual 
desires to keep as his own. Much of our conscious 
content is freely open to investigation; our sensations 
in their qualitative and quantitative forms, our volitions 
in their normal behaviour, and our emotions in their 
characteristic expression, offer a field the right to ana- 
lyze which we would not withhold. But the case stands 
otherwise with our exceptional moods, and it is upon 
these that the individualist places his affair. We have 
seen our ideas reduced to the routine of physiological 
psychology, and have marked the entrance of the social 
thinker as he sought to explain for us our ethical ideas ; 
both the intellectual and ethical have thus become secu- 
larized. In the instances of the aesthetic and religious, 
however, we prefer to have the investigator pause; for, 
in these precincts, we feel that we have superior soul- 
states which, if they be analyzed at all, must be ex- 



108 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

plained in a manner which shall adapt itself to the con- 
tent at hand. May we not have something fine and 
sacred in our poor souls, or must we surrender our 
favorite moods to the prosaic methods of scientific psy- 
chology? Aesthetic joy in contemplating the fair and 
far-off seems to possess a character which forbids com- 
monplace analysis, while religious awe, which seems to 
make man great, is even more thoroughly indisposed to 
submit to the academic classifications so readily forth- 
coming from the bold laboratories of contemporary soul- 
science. Something wild and romantic in our blood 
arises to resist the staid and rational advances of the 
analyst in his microscopic wisdom. 

(i) The Aesthetic and Analytic 

Between the analytic and aesthetic a painful but 
illuminating contrast exists; if the scientist condemns 
the artist, the artist has his condemnation for the sci- 
entist. The difference between the two methods of 
apprehending and evaluating the soul-state appears in 
direct connection with the question of content. It is 
true that scientific psychology takes notice of the " qual- 
ity " of the conscious state, but such a method of quali- 
tative analysis is not sufficient to evoke the characteristic 
in the human self. Because introspection has failed to 
include in its analysis that which to the individualist is 
the most characteristic phase of the inner life, aesthe- 
ticism has found it necessary to resort to extreme 
measures in order to redeem the self from scientism. 
Romanticism saved the self from rationalism when 
romanticism postulated the purely subjective mental 
state; Decadence delivers the self when Decadence 
opposes the morbid mental state to the staid sensation- 
alism of a scientific psychology. When rationalistic and 
scientific psychology attempts to show that the conscious 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 109 

states can hope to do no more than accompany the 
physical order and connection of stimuli, aestheticism 
makes use of introspection with the result of showing 
that there are mental states which disdain the guidance 
of the staid physical order and thus detach themselves 
from the exterior world of common causes. The aesthe- 
ticist, far from submitting to the domination of the 
rational order, evokes such mental states as seem to him 
to have spiritual worth; the mental states are thus of 
his own choosing and making. With Milton and Blake, 
Satanism made possible a deliverance from the over- 
organized world of custom; with Hoffmann and Poe, 
an inward Satanism had the effect of delivering the 
mind from the scientific arrangements of psychology, 
whence the aestheticist was able to enjoy his inward 
consciousness in complete freedom from psycho-physical 
principles. 

Apart from the extravagances of such aesthetes, it 
may be urged that the very principle of aesthetics is 
such as to bring deliverance to the mind which else- 
where is forced to feel the domination of the logical 
and ethical. Remove the logical domination of the con- 
cept, remove the ethical norm of interest, and the soul- 
state rejoices in the freedom of beauty and taste. In 
the case of Kant, who made this emancipation possible, 
it is usual to regard the deliverance of the soul from 
interest as though it pertained to sense alone; but, in 
the complete " disinterestedness " of the Kantian aesthe- 
tics, beauty is raised above both the moralic and the 
sensuous. By observing this distinction, Poe made 
Decadence possible ; said he, " Just as the Intellect con- 
cerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the 
beautiful, while the Moral Sense informs us of Duty." 13 
The connection of the beautiful with duty and truth is 
purely incidental, urges Poe, while the most appropriate 
tone of aesthetic expression is that of sadness; in thus 

13 The Poetic Principle, in loc. 



no THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

placing the beautiful upon the sad, Poe made possible 
the transition to Decadence. Kant had made art free 
when beauty became disinterested; Poe freed it again 
when he made it morbid. From Poe's beautiful sad- 
ness to Baudelaire's " Sois belle et sois triste " there 
is scarcely one step. Individualism appropriates this 
morbid aestheticism for the sole reason that individual- 
ism finds in it the supreme means of delivering the soul 
up to its self and its states of inward consciousness; 
for, where the rational and ethical, the sane and social 
suffer the individual to enjoy only such soul states as 
may participate in the world and mingle with the social 
order, the aesthetically morbid may belong to the self 
in its isolation and inwardness. From the philosophic 
point of view, the motive dominant in such art is indi- 
cated in the poem of Hood whose pathos is of singular 
service to Poe ; this appears in the expression, " Any- 
where, anywhere out of the world." The plunge into 
the morbid makes the escape from the world possible. 
In descending to the depths of his own soul, the 
aesthete was doing no more than ransacking the interior 
soul of all humanity; can scientism accompany art 
through the labyrinth of soul-states? When Baude- 
laire frees himself from all metaphysical and moralistic 
responsibility, he still vows allegiance to art whose 
dominion over him appears in the formal perfection of 
his verses. Only as Baudelaire is regarded as one who 
determined to follow the free soul-state to the utter- 
most, may one tolerate his art; but, as an intrepid 
psychologue, his value for individualism is inestimable. 
When, as is the case to-day, we are submerged in the 
purely physical, the exceptional and horrid moods of 
Baudelaire have the effect of showing the individualist 
how wonderfully and terribly free from all exteriority 
is his soul within him. With its impassibility e, the art 
of Baudelaire may further be regarded as a means of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD m 

defending one's self from scientific encroachment from 
within. Internal and impassible, idealistic and splen- 
etic, the individualism of Baudelaire may save one's 
soul-states for him, even where it can hardly save the 
soul itself. The various clusters of flowers called, 
" spleen and ideal, wine, revolt, death," constitute a 
diabolical content whose enclosing form is possessed of 
a perfection contrasting most vividly with the tumult 
within. If soul-states are not free in the art of Baude- 
laire, there is no freedom for them, and they must be 
relegated to the physical order. Where all Les Fleurs 
du Mai suggest perfect form, some, like La Beaute 
(XVIII) suggest the impassibilitee for which decadence 
became famous, while it was through such impassibility 
that the individualistic Decadent was able to effect his 
escape from the exterior world. Others, like Hymne 
a la Beaute (XXII), reveal an indifference to both Hell 
and Heaven, Satan and God, Angel and Siren, intent 
as seems to be the author in his quest of the Infinite 
within the self. The poem Confession (XLVI) be- 
trays I'egoisme humain, while he Gout du Neant 
(L,XXXII) invites the avalanche of annihilation. This 
Decadent loves to watch the flight of joy from the 
heart, the flow of tears from the eyes, and the burden 
of sorrow afflict the breast, as his Madrigal Triste 
(XC) confesses; nor can he hide his amour du difforme 
(CVI). In the poem Une Martyr e (CXXXV), he 
descends to the nethermost depths of the wretched 
cruelty which afflicted his own distressed soul, while 
his Femmes Damnees (CXXXVI) cannot atone for its 
infamy by seeking to regard these creatures as seekers 
after the Infinite — chercheuses d'infini. The progress 
of Baudelaire leads him to his Litanies de Satan 
(CXLV) ; these litanies consist of prayers for pity, 
while they praise the majesty of a being which, now 
vanquished, dreams in the profound silences of Hell. 



112 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

In the midst of these extraordinary sentiments, the 
essence of individualism, while masked most horribly 
by the splenetic and perverse fantasies, cannot wholly 
be disguised. It is the self arrayed against the world; 
the inner life craving its silence and solitude in a world 
whose exteriority has been threatening the integrity of 
the soul. Those who glorify the external aggrandize- 
ment and material progress of the nineteenth century, 
and who make science and society supreme, are con- 
fronted by an art which refuses to abide by the results 
which such a metaphysics and morality have deduced. 
Baudelaire will not accept the world; on the contrary, 
he repudiates both nature and humanity, and arrays his 
spleen and ideal against all that is scientific and social. 
Like other Decadents, Baudelaire seems to have been 
alarmed at the narrow synthesis which the culture of 
the physical and social were so rapidly elaborating, so 
that his art has for individualism the value of an attempt 
to break through the narrow circle of positivism. In 
place of the productive life of action, he would place 
the Impassibilitee of the soul; instead of the study of 
a living world with its free forms, he would substitute 
an " infinite palace " devoid of all life, and perfected 
with all the monotony of which metal and marble are 
capable; crystal cataracts, metal walls, columns instead 
of trees, nothing for the ear, but all for the eye, this 
world of the self, this artificial work of the will should 
be the true place of humanity. 14 

Perverse as was Baudelaire, fatal as had been the 
application of his ideas to the social order, the poet 
himself seems to have been wanting in anything polem- 
ical. Instead of suggesting practical nihilism, the poet 
was content to descend into his own soul, descendre en 
soi-meme, there to enjoy the pleasure of art for its own 
sake, pour le plaisir d'ecrire un poeme. 15 When this 

14 Reve Parisien, CXXVI. lS Op. cit., 22. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 113 

aesthetic subjectivism allied itself with the ideal of 
impassibility, it placed its author in a position where 
he was strangely, yet consistently, careless of any idea 
of social change or human progress. According to 
Gautier, " he had a perfect horror of philanthropists, 
progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians, Utopians, and 
all those who pretend to effect any change from the 
invariability of nature and the fatal order of society." 1(J 
Reposing in an autonomous beauty, Baudelaire was 
absolutely indifferent to the claims of naturalistic truth 
and social duty. La poesie ne peut pas, sous peine de 
mort ou de decheance, s'assimiler a la science ou a la 
morale. 17 

Nevertheless, the free individualist is not as perverse 
as his attitude might indicate. The hero of the inner 
life is not unwilling himself to enlist under the banner 
of analysis, provided that banner be unfurled in a noble 
conflict. Thus it comes about that a distinction must 
be made between the psychologist and the psychologue, 
between the investigator who studies the conscious 
states as such, and he who views them in their proper 
setting in accordance with the methods those states 
demand. The psychologist is forced to assume that 
there is nothing extraordinary about the mental state 
which he identifies, while the psychologue is willing to 
grant that, in certain phases of the soul's life, he has 
a special case upon his hands. Where the psychologist 
is intent upon indicating the form, the psychologue is 
'more anxious to interpret the content of the exceptional 
mental product; and where the academic enthusiast is 
determined to subordinate' the rich inner mood to some 
rubric which has been found serviceable in the general 
study of the soul, the free psychologue is willing to let 
the superior soul-state dictate the terms of its surrender 
to science. The psychologist is prepared to handle the 

18 Reve Parisian, 19. " lb., 23 



Ii 4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

more common and masculine forms of the inner life; 
but, when he is confronted by the finer and more fem- 
inine characteristics, he is brought to the realization 
that his habitual methods are ill-adapted to the question 
at hand. 

The insufficiency of psychologism will appear when 
one considers some of the most characteristic reactions 
of the human spirit, as these are found in the aesthetical 
and religious aspects of the mind. If the psychologist 
is privileged to analyze the artistic mind, has he hopes 
that his common methods will serve him in arriving at 
some satisfactory conclusion as to its real content? 
Where the psychologist feels competent to observe and 
experiment upon the usual consciousness of the average 
individual, does he rejoice in the same confidence when 
he is brought face to face with the exceptional state of 
the man of genius ? In our own age, we have witnessed 
the peculiar conflict between the generalizing mind of 
science and the egoistic assertion of the aesthetic con- 
sciousness. Romanticism and scientism grew up to- 
gether; like Jacob and Esau, they struggled even before 
birth. As a result, when the scientific mind has been 
called upon to explain the phenomena produced by 
genius flashing out beyond itself, he has been forced to 
characterize these appearances as some examples of the 
abnormal. It was in this spirit that Lombroso under- 
took to explain what is best in the human intellect by 
instituting a comparison between genius and insanity; 
in more recent years, Nordau has undertaken the same 
t^sk with reference to romantic and post-romantic cul- 
ture. In this manner, the Romantic school, the Deca- 
dents, and the Symbolists were placed in a field outside 
the psychology of the Bourgoisie, while their attempts 
at self-assertion were identified as so many forms of 
" ego-mania." How stormy was the conflict between 
art and science in the nineteenth century, how unhappy 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 115 

the difference of opinion between those who, with per- 
fect sincerity, sought to explain man to himself and 
those who, in their own manner, attempted to express 
to man some of the personal possibilities of the vast 
humanity lurking within his soul ! Which was right, 
scientist or artist? Which affords the more certain 
method of analysis, that of the psychologist or that of 
the psychologue? 

To the credit of the investigator who relegated the 
romantic strain in humanity to the abnormal, it may 
be said that he recognized the insufficiency of his trite 
schemes of study; unable to play the part of both 
psychologist and psychologue, after the manner of such 
an investigator, as Paul Bourget, he dismissed the ex- 
ceptional mental state as something, not superior, but 
inferior and imbecile. In order to explain, if possible, 
the ego's incapacity for social adaptation, Nordau ap- 
peals to such a work as Sollier's Psychologie de I'Idiot 
et de I'lmbecile. 18 The attitude of Decadents toward 
the beautiful and ugly is explained by Nordau upon the 
biological basis of " chimiotaxia," or cellular attraction 
and repulsion, which is strangely lacking in the Deca- 
dent, who does not feel repelled by the repulsive. 19 
Unwilling to allow that Baudelaire, for example, dis- 
interestedly simulated his Satanism for the sake of 
investigating the possibilities of the anti-natural and 
anti-social, Nordau resorts to clinical cases, as these 
were reported by Sazaret, Etude sur le Simulation de 
la Folie. 20 

The examination of the artificial soul-states sought 
by Huysmans' Des Esseintes, in A Rebours, a book 
which is more consciously satirical than unconsciously 
pathological, Nordau illumines his scientific pages with 
a comparison between Des Esseintes and the cirripedia, 

18 Degeneration, Eng. tr. 1896, 264, note. 

19 lb., 282-284. ^ lb., 295, note. 



Ii6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

a sacculus " which lives in the condition of a parasite 
in the intestinal canal of certain Crustacea." 21 Nordau 
does not fail to perceive that, with the artist, " self- 
deliverance " is the direct cause of aesthetic creation, 
although his inherent sociality demands that he connect 
this with the thought that the artist is inspired also by 
the desire to act upon others. But, in defending art 
from the idea of imitation, which was indeed far re- 
moved from the aims of Romanticism, Nordau bases his 
aesthetics upon the results of observations made upon 
the disease called by the Russians, myriachit, in which 
inhibition forces the patient to imitate actions in others, 
even when these are disagreeable or pernicious. 22 Upon 
the basis of pathological inhibition, Nordau concludes 
that the origin of art must be sought elsewhere. The 
factor of sympathy, which insures the objectification of 
the self -initiated aestheticism, is discussed in the same 
extra-psychological fashion. The rights of aestheticism 
are thus settled, not in the studio, but in the clinic. 

(2) Aestheticism as Individualism 

The expulsion of the self, as this was brought about 
in the Enlightenment with its regard for objective 
reason and exterior social morality, has had the effect 
of creating the desire to return to the self as something 
internal and free. With Romanticism, this desire ex- 
pressed itself as eudaemonism, although the sense of 
joy carried with it the idea of liberation from all forms 
of exteriority. Without violation of the facts of his- 
tory, it may safely be asserted that individualism is 
aesthetic individualism ; for, while the development of 
Romanticism had the effect of producing immoralism 
and irrationalism, it was in direct connection with the 
aesthetical that the liberation of the ego had taken 

« Degeneration, 309, note. a lb., 323, note. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 117 

place. Ultimately, the definite forms of exterior exist- 
ence were to assume the character of scientism and 
sociality; but before the positivistic organization of the 
exterior order was begun, the ideal of aesthetic indi- 
vidualism was well entrenched. That which scientism 
and sociality have been seeking consists in intellectual 
data and practical effects, that which can be perceived 
and that which can be done; with aesthetic individual- 
ism, the goal of both intellect and will consists of the 
immediate consciousness of self and the direct impulse 
toward self-expression. Since the scientific is conse- 
crated either to the exterior in the form of physical 
data or such conscious states as can be linked with and 
explained by physical facts, the aesthetical is forced to 
concern itself with such soul-states as can be evoked 
with freedom from within; and since ethics has decided 
to follow the dictates of the social, the needs of indi- 
vidualism can be best appreciated and furthered by a 
view of life which abjures work in the social world in 
order that it may devote itself to the inner life, where 
private ideal is bound to mean more than social need. 
While aestheticism tends ever to repose in the eudae- 
monistic as its sure ground, it does not fail to make use 
of another and perhaps superior ideal, that of formal 
perfection. If the intellectual significance seems to 
suffer and the moral intensity dwindle in this pursuit 
of form, the purely aesthetical can only gain by the 
immediate elevation of the beautiful. If this element 
of beauty is viewed in its complete subjectivity as an 
immediate effect produced in the soul, the cause of the 
elevation appears in the perfection of the work of art 
as such. In his Philosophy of Composition, Poe insists 
upon the aesthetic unity as that which is calculated to 
produce the sheer artistic effect desired, while this unity 
expresses itself in connection with pure tonal effect. 
In the midst of this poetic technic, the individualistic 



Il8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

element makes its presence felt in the fact that all poetic 
beauty depends upon the direct effect upon the soul. 
Were the principle of composition a moral or meta- 
physical one, the effect upon the self could be only 
derivative, since it would need to be conveyed to the 
self through the medium of the Good or the True; but 
so intrinsic is the soul-state, so sovereign is the self, 
that it is more appropriate to make the frank appeal 
to consciousness as such. In the case of Poe's poem, 
The Raven, the idea of a non-reasoning creature capable 
of speech serves to indicate symbolically the idea of 
verbal resonance in independence of all meaning; so 
superior is the aesthetical ideal that it cannot suffer 
itself to be sacrificed even to Truth. Poe having indi- 
cated the possibility of pure aestheticism, it remained 
for Baudelaire the Decadent and Verlaine the Symbolist 
to press on the extremes of the doctrine. 

So obvious are the imperfections of such aestheticism 
that no word of criticism is needed to denote them; 
more important is it to inquire concerning the value 
which such aestheticism can have for individualism. 
The responsibilities of decadent aestheticism must be 
borne by the artists and aesthetes involved; at the same 
time, it may be suggested that the essential cause of the 
subjective movement is to be found in the extreme ob- 
jectivity and mediocrity of the age in which aestheticism 
had its origin. Given a period of genuine artistic life 
and creativeness like that of ancient Athens or modern 
Florence, and the need of pure aestheticism could never 
be felt, while the artist could pursue his work under 
the naive impression that he was simply imitating nature 
or glorifying the social order. The " nature " of such 
aesthetic periods might well serve as a model for the 
most superior art, while the aristocratic social order 
could equally well supply inspiration for the creative 
artist ; but, with the coming of modern rationalism and 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 119 

moralism, with the development of contemporary sci- 
entism and sociality, the artistic attempt to imitate 
nature and glorify society could do no more than pro- 
duce absurd art, if any at all. For this reason, the art 
of the social and scientific nineteenth century was neces- 
sarily so anti-natural and anti-social as to appear as 
nothing more or less than an attack upon the True and 
the Good ; indeed, the scientific ' true ' and the social 
' good ' could not fail to come under the ban of aesthe- 
ticism, which could only adhere to the intrinsic qualities 
and characteristics of the inner life in all freedom from 
the natural and social. The human self must persist in 
the midst of all progress that occurs in the world; and, 
while aestheticism is by no means wanting in distress- 
ing features, it has the merit of having been true to the 
principles of spiritual life as it understood them. To 
have scientific peace on earth and social good will among 
men is doubtless desirable; but, if such external benefits 
involve the loss of inwardness, better is it to have the 
confusion incident upon the paradoxes and contra- 
dictions of aesthetic individualism. In the midst of 
this painful conflict in contemporary thought, the pos- 
sibility of a. higher synthesis does not fail to appear, 
and to such a synthesis aesthetic individualism approx- 
imates. 

To assert the rights of aesthetic decadence is only to 
assert the right of the self to exist as something free in 
its cognitions. Art is striving to free us from science; 
symbolism is attempting the stupendous task of liber- 
ating the soul from scientism. The sincere individ- 
ualist, who feels that his inner life is at stake, is of 
course suspicious of an aesthetic which so gorgeously 
indulges its sense of freedom as to threaten the soul 
with debauchery; but the work of liberating humanity 
must be done, so that almost any means is acceptable. 
Only in the sense of an emancipation, then, can the 



120 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

extremes of aestheticism be tolerated; and yet are the 
extremes of aesthetic sensualism, with the interests of 
the soul's inner life in the foreground, any worse than 
the extremes of scientific materialism, where the affairs 
of the self are thrust into the background? One method 
exaggerates the importance of the individual, the other 
so minimizes it as to render it null. While the indi- 
vidualist is likely to hesitate when it comes to assenting 
to the ideals of Decadence, he should be able to see 
that in this exaggerated aesthetic the chief aim has been 
to grant the soul the right of self-existence and self- 
expression. The " I think " in which the individualist 
is privileged to rejoice is hardly to be found in any 
other form of human culture; the artist serves us where 
the scientist refuses aid. 

In the same manner, aestheticism has made it possible 
to give expression to the inner states of consciousness, 
where scientism can only wish the individual to keep 
the silence. The aim of scientism is to reduce man to 
the rank of a ' species,' and how valiantly did Darwin 
make war upon the spiritual life of his age; the aim 
of aestheticism is to raise humanity to an independent 
position, so that the exaggerations of Decadence are 
well meant and well timed. In the eyes of science, all 
that man can do is to carry out the purpose of nature, 
whence civilization and culture are supposed to assume 
a naturalistic character of which the Spencerian State 
may serve as the convenient type. But the expression 
of the inner life, as this comes through the improvisa- 
tions of the free individual, is not to be relegated to an 
inferior order of existence. What can the culture of 
naturalism do for the ideals and strivings of the aesthe- 
tic individual, what promises of self -expressionism can 
it hold out? As ordinarily understood with scientism, 
" nature " cannot provide a place for the adequate 
objectification of the self-existent ego; at the same time, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 121 

the aesthetic ego cannot longer remain in its morbid 
subjectivity, whence arises the need of a higher than 
the scientific synthesis of the world in which the indi- 
vidual finds itself. 

Meanwhile, the value of free aestheticism must not 
be overlooked, since in the exaggerated conscious state 
of the decadent the freedom from both nature and 
society manifests itself. Were there no aestheticism, it 
would be possible for the naturalistic thinker to insist 
upon that rigid parallelism which, while it may make 
smooth the path of mere speculation, forbids the exist- 
ence and expression of the inner state as such. If this 
inner soul-state could be expressed as a superior mental 
condition whose spiritual character could not be ques- 
tioned, the principles of individualism would be more 
consistent and more acceptable; but, wanting this supe- 
riority, the soul-state asserts its independence when it 
shows itself to be different from the usual mental con- 
dition which is so easily explained after the manner of 
psycho-physics. The self must be free; if this freedom 
cannot come to it in the form of the idealistic, it must 
enter in the form of the morbid and unusual. In the 
attempt to keep the inner life free from exterior intru- 
sion, the decadent has performed a valuable work how- 
ever questionable may have been the means of arriving 
at his goal. 

II. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WORTH OF LIFE 

If the natural order, so fixed and forbidding in its 
rigorous physicality, makes no room for the free, interior 
joy of life, it will be found to be no less inimical to 
affirmation of worth on the part of the individual. Man 
cannot find joy within himself when his life is inter- 
preted by science; man cannot secure worth from the 
world which is now in possession of science. In imme- 



122 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

diate response to its hasty metaphysics of the natural 
order, scientism has elaborated a world of forms and a 
world of functions; but in neither the statics nor the 
dynamics of the natural does the individual find the 
opportunity to get values out of the world. Scientism 
differs from humanism in that scientism regards all work 
as the exercise of functions, while humanistic individual- 
ism lays its emphasis upon the principle of creativeness, 
whereby the individual is able to perfect a work of his 
own. In opposition to the ideal of functioning, which 
is ever tainted by the thought that all such action is a 
merely automatic response to exterior excitement, the 
ideal of creating involves a certain amount of prelim- 
inary deliberation, in the light of which the ego considers 
whether this or that shall be done; indeed, egoism goes 
so far as to question whether action has the power to 
create the values which the? human self feels called upon 
to seek. In every case where the worth of life is con- 
sidered, the individualist demands that action shall spring 
from the " I will," in which alone may value be found. 
In this manner, the struggle for value consists in assert- 
ing the rights of an independent initiative, in default of 
which the evaluating ego is ready to repudiate the nat- 
ural order, and set up the independent standard of 
immoralism. 

i. Serfhood in Worth 

The essential principle in all human values is found 
in the ego's desire to go forth from the very depths of 
its interior self to the most essential and remote phases 
of reality. That which scientism allows is no more than 
immediate response to the more superficial aspects of 
the world, as these are recognized in the satisfaction of 
immediate wants. Now, such mere functioning is not 
evaluating, whence egoism turns away from naturalism 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 123 

in order that the true self within may seek its proper 
possession in the world without. The cultivation of the 
things peculiar to immediate welfare, so dear to the 
utilitarian of all special schools, is in no sense the delib- 
erate cultivation of values; for these true worths are 
concerned with that which has its source within the 
depths of man's nature while their goal lies over the 
horizon of immediacy. This distinction between the 
immediate and the remote, both within and without the 
self, is one which scientism cannot possibly make, since 
scientism has before it as its data and factors nothing 
but immediate impulses within and perceptible objects 
without. In such a double immediateness the worth of 
life cannot be found. 

The value-problem arises when the individual in the 
consciousness of his inner life attempts to secure from 
the world about him certain benefits which the natural 
order is not allowed to supply. There was indeed a time 
in the history of humanity, although then the value-ideal 
was not recognized, when the! human will drew from the 
depths of the world-order the kalokagathia so dear to 
the soul of classicism; but the advent of scientism had 
the effect of denying to the human will the superior 
benefits once enjoyed. In this manner, there has arisen 
a veritable struggle for life-values, a conflict in the 
course of which one is led to raise the question whether 
values do exist, and whether man has the right to secure 
them. The life of naturalism may permit of functional 
activity without further allowing work, just as it may 
promise utility where it does not grant worth, but the 
work of worth is that which for individualism is the 
one thing needful. The naturalistic conception of man, 
which regards the human being as one thing among 
others, and which looks upon the individual as a " speci- 
men of the species," cannot construe the active life of 
man as that which is destined to yield value. When 



124 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



life is regarded in the functional manner, the idea of 
work fails to evince that which is most characteristic 
of man, the internal and intellectual. According to 
naturism, intelligence is no more than an instrument 
finely adapted to handle the things and arrive at the 
ends which are peculiar to the exterior, perceptible life 
of the human species. It is admissible that man's active 
life may have begun in no other realm than that of 
immediate activity, just as it may further be pointed 
out that a certain nucleus of human activity is still to 
be found in that which is at once practical and per- 
ceptible; but to elaborate a philosophy of life out of 
these naturistic data is to overlook the most significant 
elements in man as worker and valuer. It is still pos- 
sible to assume that the will may so internalize its activi- 
ties as to proceed from the depths of the soul to the 
remoter borders of the world, and in the possibility of 
proceeding from the internal to the remote the worth 
of human life consists. 

As examples of the work of worth, both art and 
morality reveal the fact that the human will is capable 
of this double movement of intension and extension. 
Common, functional activity with its hedonic and utili- 
tarian consequences, fails to bring into play that which 
is at once characteristic of both man within and the 
world without. Indeed, naturalism cannot evoke the 
characteristic in the individual, even where it may claim 
to express that which is psychologically essential; nat- 
uralism thus fails to find a basis for morality. Where 
work is viewed in the light of its character, it is sym- 
bolized by the arrow which shoots beyond the bow rather 
than by the hammer which does not leave the hand. 
In its fullest meaning, action is doubly idealized, in that 
it springs from the idea within, while it is aimed at the 
idea without; the ego which makes such action manifest 
is conscious of who he is and of what he is doing. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 125 

In the so-called ethics of naturalism, as this may be 
found in the one-time ethics of Spencer, there is no 
trace of that introverted and individualized activity- 
peculiar to genuine humanism. In true art and true 
morality, the supreme factor is the " I will " of indi- 
vidualism. 

By its very nature, the human will has the power to 
establish values in the world. In many instances of 
action, the individual may be impelled by the incentive 
which promises some immediate benefit in the world of 
sense, just as it may be aroused by desires which speak 
for the immediate needs of conscious life within. But 
the essence of volition is found in an idea in the delib- 
erate pursuit of which the stolid activity of the will 
stands out in strong outline against the warmer impul- 
sion of desire. To will is to will; that is, to will is to 
strive after that which, in the individual's judgment, 
has worth for man. As scientism has no real morality, 
so it has no essential values; these are found in an 
order of life where the self as centre draws its own 
circle of limitation. The possibilities of the will are 
determined by the will itself in the light of that which 
has, or is judged to have, worth. An individualist may 
thus will an object of sensuous enjoyment after the 
manner of Sudermann, or he may will the naught in a 
manner peculiar to Stirner; in the case of either ex- 
treme, it is the individualized will in search of values 
which determines the volition. Scientism cannot under- 
stand that man is anxious to realize worth in the world ; 
therefore scientism persists in seeking to settle accounts 
with the individual by proffering spurious satisfactions, 
like pleasures and utilities. 

It is commonly assumed that the negations of sci- 
entism have had to do with ideas alone, as though the 
agnostic veto applied to the individual's purely specu- 
lative attempt to lay hold upon life. But scientism has 



I 2 6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

assumed the same forbidding attitude to the deeds of 
the will in the latter's attempt to lay hold of values in 
the world. Indeed, the circle of scientism has been 
drawn about both free ideas and free volitions. The 
history of individualism shows how man has willed the 
Beyond even when he has not always found it in his 
power to think the Beyond. In its more definite form 
the Will-to-the-Beyond has assumed the form of self- 
will, or the will-to-selfhood, so well known with Stirner, 
Wagner, and Nietzsche. Where Romanticism simply 
postulated the Beyond as an indefinite object of poetical 
sentiment, the individualism of the mid-nineteenth cen- 
tury made the Beyond a definite object of volition. 
Wagner's Siegfried, who was delightfully innocent of 
modern scientism, showed his ability to create values 
out of his own will — Denn selbst muss der freie sich 
schaffen. 23 In the same manner, Ibsen's " right man " 
of the " third empire " was to come into being as " the 
one who wills himself," just as Nietzsche's Zarathustra 
was the one who could say, " I will." What scientific 
conception of the world were capable of such intensity 
of individuation as to make possible or even permit such 
a self- valuation ? In defiance of scientism, with its 
half-hearted conception of action, individualism has 
proceeded to create values in the world in the form 
of the willed worths of the human ego. To will the 
immediate and useful is by no means the same as to 
will the values which belong to the inner nature of the 
free ego. Agnostic scientism prefers that man should 
neither know God nor will the self; if individualism 
has not been alive to the exigencies of the divine prob- 
lem, it has not failed to solve the human one. 

The struggle for the worth of life has had the effect 
of developing an individualistic psychology wherein the 
ideal of worth has been relegated to the human will. 

" 3 Walkure, II AM., II Sc. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 127 

Values are volitional values produced by the strength 
of the self-propelled will. In the single attribute of 
strength has the individualist sought to find the essence 
of the will; where the conflict over the Joy of Life 
was decided by the refinements of emotion, the conflict 
over values has centered in the idea of the ego's ability 
to reinforce its own motives. When, in the struggle 
for the worth of life, the individualist seeks to express 
selfhood through strength, one is not to assume that 
this new doctrine is equivalent to the elder maxim, 
Might makes right. However paradoxical it may 
appear, the stronger the individualist is within, the less 
inclined for destructive action does he appear to be. 
In his opposition to established law, Schlegel was purely 
aesthetical; the same may be said of the more danger- 
ous Baudelaire. In the same spirit of passive resist- 
ance, did Stirner express himself : " Now, as my object 
is not the overthrow of an established order but my 
elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a 
political or social but an egoistic purpose and deed." 24 
There can be no doubt that there was perfect serenity 
in the midst of Emerson's intense non-conformity, while 
one can believe that even Nietzsche was free from any 
desire to revolutionize the world. Aye, in the most 
intense individualism and evaluation of Christ himself, 
there was no thought of outward insurrection. Strength, 
then, is internal strength, an arming and fortifying one's 
self within; such strength proceeds from the idea of 
self-value, while it contents itself with self-will. 

To make one's self the goal of all one's volitions, as 
egoism has been doing, is to assert that the value of 
life is to be found in the individual. Nevertheless, in 
seeking the value of life within the self, the individ- 
ualist does not exalt a petty, punctual egoism of self- 
love; for it has been the self as the seat of spiritual life 

Si The Ego and His Otvn, tr. Byington, 421. 



128 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

with its aesthetical, moral, and religious values rather 
than the private personality of an ego with its pleasures, 
which individualism has seen fit to uphold. When, as 
in the happy instance of antique culture, the outer world 
was not allowed to threaten the sanctity of the inner 
life, there was humanism without egoism, intellectual- 
ism without egoistic opposition; but, where modern life 
uses scientism to persecute the individual, a more mili- 
tant humanism becomes necessary. In a world of cul- 
ture where all tendencies worked outwardly for the 
exaltation of the physical, egoism becomes a necessary 
movement for the preservation of the human soul. 
When the view of nature becomes less scientific and 
more liberal, it is quite likely that egoism will retire 
from the field; but until scientism yields, it will be 
necessary for individualism to take upon itself the task 
of asserting the worth of human life as such. We must 
abide by Protagoras until Socrates is come. 

While individualism has often been one with egoism, 
it has never lost sight of perfect humanism. But how 
is such humanism to be advanced? According to the 
common assumption, we may argue that, the more ego- 
ism there is, the less humanism; the more sociality, the 
more humanism. This, which is really the fallacy of 
composition, makes necessary the distinction between 
the intensive qualities of a concept and its purely quan- 
titative extension. According to the principles of social 
thinking, " humanity " is a class-term the validity of 
which depends upon the assembling of individuals under 
one general head ; according to individualism, " human- 
ity " is an essence which can be discovered only by 
analyzing the individual in all the character of his inner 
existence. Modern democracy gave excessive width to 
the concept; modern sociality, with its biological preju- 
dices, has added to this diffusion. As a philosophy of 
rights, which originally had no other aim than the ele- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 129 

mental welfare of the human species, such a humanism 
was just; but when this exteriorizing humanism is imme- 
diately turned into a philosophy of life, the quantitative, 
extensive principle does not obtain. Man as man may 
have within him an essential humanity which all moral- 
ity must recognize; but, when this humanity is organ- 
ized in the form of institution, and we are asked to 
believe that the old content may be found in the new 
form, the immoralistic idealist can only become skep- 
tical. 

With the individualist, humanity is an idea which 
signifies something more than a generalization elabo- 
rated to include all anthropoids under one head ; human- 
ity is essential and characteristic. In particular, the 
humanism of that individualism for which immoralism 
stands includes the superioristic in mankind; whence it 
is not the man eating and working, but the man thinking 
and creating which is set up as the standard. Social 
thought starts and terminates with the man as something 
given ; individualism postulates the elevation of human- 
ity which is ever coming about by means of human 
perfection. To enclose the given man in a circle of 
social conceptualism is not to arrive at humanity; this 
superior notion is elaborated only as humanity is con- 
sidered as the subject of inward culture. Thus it is 
the cultural, rather than the natural in humanity, which 
has guided the immoralist in his assertion of the indi- 
vidual's supremacy, as also in his opposition to the fixed 
order in which only man external is made the subject 
of observation. As individualism regards culture as 
the Good, sociality can hardly do otherwise than view 
it as the bad, inasmuch as culture takes man's attention 
away from the immediate world with its practical prob- 
lems, while it works also for the elevation of the supe- 
rior above the inferior. 

In contrast with the individualistic view which con- 



130 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



siders the self as something connected quite loosely with 
the social order, contemporary moralism offers the con- 
ception of the self as a " cell in the social organism." 
When the essential issues of life are raised, which of 
the competing conceptions is likely to appear the more 
moral? If it seem immoralistic to consider the self in 
that independence which its unique nature demands, 
what ethical degradation is involved in the current social 
conception according to which the spiritual is absorbed 
in the social ! When the question is placed upon the 
basis of value, what is there in the objectified social 
order which can compensate for the loss of personal 
worth which the social system demands? The social 
puts men together, but that is not to say that they 
belong together; furthermore, the social system puts 
men together, not for the sake of evoking in the indi- 
vidual that which is characteristic of his nature, but in 
order that more and more socialized work may be done. 
In thus assembling men industrially, sociality sacrifices 
a permanent value to a passing utility; the individual is 
not suffered to live within or to work from within, so 
that his humanity is lost to him. The genuine Inner of 
human life thus perishes with exteriorizing progress. 

Immoralistic individualism has still another complaint 
against the exteriorizing system of the social moralism 
which springs from the naturalistic order; that com- 
plaint involves the Outer, the world in which the indi- 
vidual is supposed to live and work. With the asser- 
tion of the individual in all the privacy of his interior 
existence, it would seem as though the work of the 
immoralist were done; but immoralism has ever found 
it possible to provide the humanized self with an objec- 
tive in the form of Humanity. When the essential 
meaning of humanity is considered, it is possible, aye 
necessary, to affirm that it is the individualistic rather 
than the social which has had the fate to organize the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 131 

idea of humanity. This individualistic conception of 
humanity depends upon sympathism. Upon the natural- 
istic basis of social ethics, the attempt to produce human- 
istic sentiment has resulted in nothing more convincing 
than " altruism." This modern thought, this sentiment, 
with which ancient humanism found it possible to dis- 
pense, has assumed the twin form of benevolence and 
conscience. From Cumberland to Smith, from Smith 
to the school of social ethics, this dual norm was main- 
tained : the earlier period sought to justify it as an 
ideal; the later one has attempted to realize it as a 
principle of experience. Arguing that there is a natural 
principle of benevolence or sociality, which holds men 
together as a social unit, the school of social morality 
then attempted to transfigure this social sentiment as 
the ethical ideal of conscience. 

In response to such moralization, immoralism urged 
that, since the bond which was assumed to assemble 
men on the planet was based upon the inferior principle 
of naturalism in the form of the herding instinct, the 
so-called moral sentiment could not be regarded as 
sufficiently sanctioned. It was in the repudiation of 
social conscience, the conscience of the species, that 
immoralism came into being and acquired its unhappy 
renown. Stendhal and Emerson anticipated it; Dos- 
toievsky and Nietzsche made of it an ethical system of 
hardness, if not of cruelty. The appeal to gregarious- 
ness was lost on such individualists; the conscience of 
the race failed to soften their victorious egoism. In 
connection with the history of immoralistic egoism, the 
special case of Dostoievsky and Wagner may be cited 
with the aim of showing that in some instances the 
intrepid individualist found it expedient to abandon the 
severities of his doctrine and repose at last in the softer 
conceptions of sympathy and compunction. This may 
indeed be granted; but the retreat of the Russian novel- 



132 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



ist and German musician was marked by an advance 
inward toward a complete compassionism rather than 
outward in the direction of altruism. In the case of 
Dostoievsky, there is no suggestion of the greatest hap- 
piness of the greatest number as the sanction of mor- 
ality; rather was it a sense of universal misery which 
led him to abandon his immoralistic egoism and seek 
refuge in the idea of divine compassion. The same 
may be urged in the case of Wagner, where the strident 
will-to-selfhood yielded to a soteriological sense of sym- 
pathy whose spiritual character was such as to involve 
intellectual illumination instead of human good feeling. 
It is thus a spiritual humanism which lies behind the 
principles of immoralistic self-assertiveness. Indeed, in 
this sympathism, more Buddhistic and Slavonic than 
British as it is, there is a point where both phases of 
humanism, the cultural and the compassionate, meet; 
this is in the notion of insight. Aiming at insight, 
Hellenic humanism seeks the development of that which 
is superior and permanent in humanity; guided by such 
insight, Hindoo humanism proceeds to elaborate its sys- 
tem of sympathism. The dialectical character of such 
immoralistic humanism appears at once; no longer is it 
the naturalistic sense of a common animality, but the 
spiritual consciousness of essential unity which brings 
the sons of men together. When, therefore, the social 
moralist says, " man," he means something of a bio- 
logical and anthropological nature; when the individ- 
ualist pronounces the term, it signifies a spiritual com- 
munism whose roots descend into the essential nature 
of humanity whose place is the spiritual order. Fur- 
thermore, the immoralistic character of humanism is 
such as to involve profound pessimistic considerations, 
since it is the realization of the seriousness of man's 
condition in the universe which acts as the bond to 
draw men together. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 



133 



In the struggle for the existence and preservation of 
human values, the contrasted ideals of egoistic strength 
and human sympathy meet in one common sense of 
interior life. If, as Anatole France has said, " only 
egoists really love women," it may be asserted that 
only individualists really love humanity. If egoism and 
altruism represent contradictory values, individualism 
and sympathism are suggestive of two sides of one and 
the same human affair. The individualist who, not 
contented with the self -life parcelled out to him by a 
differentiating natural order, takes selfhood into his 
own hands and thus wills his inner being, is in a posi- 
tion to appreciate the essential meaning of humanity; 
and this appreciation becomes the means of enlighten- 
ing him as to meaning of another's life. To abandon 
egoism for the purpose of securing an altruistic stand- 
point is to extinguish the torch which is to light up the 
world of humanity as a whole. Naturalism, which 
knows nothing of humanity save that superficial aspect 
of it which appears in egoism and altruism, is thus in 
no position to indicate to mankind the value of human 
life in the world. 

2. The Individualistic Initiative; 

In the capacity of valuer, the ego endeavors to exer- 
cise that free initiative by means of which he shall put 
his will into the world; for this individualistic initia- 
tive, systematic metaphysics, whether rationalistic or 
positivistic, must make way. Where the individual in 
his quest of the real joy of life had demanded the 
privilege of receiving from the world the impressions 
which should become veritable soul-states, the elabo- 
ration of life- values finds the same individual asserting 
his right to react upon the world in a manner peculiar 
to his own will. Under what circumstances does the 
human ego really act, and what is the character of that 



I3 4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

which we call a " deed " ? In taking up the activistic 
phase of human life, individualism does not fall into 
the error of assuming that a theory is a necessary pre- 
liminary to life itself, even where individualism exer- 
cises the faint hope that a critical conception of life 
may have the effect of making life appear more genuine 
in its sense of joy, of worth, of truth. Life will go on 
of itself, while the inner life of man, although wanting 
in sincerity and strength, will ever possess something 
like soul-states, free initiatives, and ideals. But genuine 
and consistent action, like sincere feeling and thought, 
must find a sufficient ground, or an approximation to it. 
What, then, is really meant when one says, " I will " ? 
The individualistic " I will " takes up the question 
in the spirit of pessimism in obedience to which indi- 
vidualism is led to question the value of action as such. 
Non-individualistic systems, the whole legion of which 
seem equally possessed of the energistic spirit, always 
take action for granted; the inner life of feelings may 
be impossible and thought-ideals unattainable, but action 
can never be tainted by the skepticism which invades the 
passive precincts of man's nature. If life be a dream, 
then one may still have Calderon's belief that such a 
dream permits moral action; if knowledge be of no 
avail, one may still follow Voltaire and cultivate the 
garden; if agnosticism shuts out the view of spiritual 
reality, one may still exercise his will and with Comte 
take up his social duties undismayed. Those whose 
strict scientific conceptions tend to sever them from the 
far off sources of spiritual life are ever the ones who 
recommend a course of activity in life, when it is quite 
thinkable that such activity depends upon the accept- 
ance of those remote ideals which the skeptical critics 
reject. As a result, systems of action and philosophies 
of work have ever placed the affair of action upon 
naught. For this reason, the individualistic " I will " 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 135 

can find no support in the scientific view of things in 
the light of which man's life is limited by the natural- 
istic horizon; if thinking can proceed upon this basis, 
which is quite doubtful, it seems impossible for action 
to be carried on in the scientific spirit of immediacy. 

The problem of action is made more perverse, more 
paradoxical, when it is observed that those who raise 
the human will above the restricted realm of scientific 
thinking are not the ones who commend activity for 
man. Stated broadly, they who have no right to believe 
in the free initiative, still recommend work; those who 
have come into possession of the limitless will, discoun- 
tenance activity. Where Geulincx delivers the will from 
the meshes of the corporeal world and identifies it with 
the will of God, he refuses to conclude that man can 
therefore do everything, and asserts the proud negation, 
nihil volo. With the strong Satanism of Milton and 
Blake, belief in the supremacy of the will leads to 
nothing more than ideas and words. In the instances 
of Emerson and Stendhal, one observes how these strong 
immoralists were ever disinclined to make malicious use 
of the over-free will which they had discovered. The 
same practical passivism erected upon an energistic basis 
is none the less apparent in Stirner and Nietzsche, whose 
extravagant anarchism and atheism, instead of leading 
their authors to take up arms against earth and heaven, 
merely left them in a Dionysian condition wherein 
activity was purely internal and personal. In the case 
of Schopenhauer, the paradox is most strident, for 
where, in his speculative view of things, Schopenhauer 
concludes that the will can do all, the moral conclusion 
which follows is to the effect that the will should do 
nothing: where, by its very nature, the will is not only 
free but almighty, 25 the practical exercise of the indi- 
viduated will can only lead to remorse, 26 while the just 

26 Welt als Wille u. Yors., § 53. -« lb., § 65. 



1 36 THE GROUND AND GOAE OF HUMAN LIFE 

conclusion has to do with renunciation and the denial 
of the will-to-live. 27 In its special form, the dialectic 
of Schopenhauer is quite different from if not opposed 
to that of Geulincx; but, since both these activists rele- 
gate causality to the Supreme Being, whether God or 
the Will-to-Lyive, and since both alike suffer the indi- 
vidual to participate in this omnipotent will, both Geu- 
lincx and Schopenhauer may be said to proceed from 
the same metaphysical notion of all-willing to the same 
moral conclusion of no-willing. 

If, therefore, in the career of voluntarism, they who 
have no metaphysical right to believe in action still 
recommend work, while they who know the secret of 
all-willing refuse to allow action, the problem of per- 
sonal action, of individual initiative, becomes more than 
usually perplexing; indeed, the problem of action seems 
even more confusing than the question of thought. In 
the instances of Geulincx and Schopenhauer, where the 
dialectical profundity lies, the secret of the paradox 
seems to lurk in the special question of individualism; 
thus it is the " I act " which appears so appalling to 
them. With Geulincx, self-inspection leads to self- 
despection, 28 just as in the case of Schopenhauer it is 
the idea that the whole will-to-live is concealed with the 
individual's brain, 29 which forces the thinker to repudi- 
ate that personal omnipotence which seems to him so 
terrible. Scientific thinkers, whose skepticism screens 
from their eyes the august and fearful meaning of the 
human will, are very ready to recommend action because 
they have no means of knowing what the word " action " 
means. With the scientific thinker of modern times, the 
appeal to action as a way of solving the problem of life 
has never been more than a makeshift, a subterfuge, a 
sop to the wolves. 

With voluntaristic thinkers the world over, the tend- 

27 Welt als Wille u. Vors., § 68. 

28 Ethica, Tr. I, cap. II, sec. 2, § 2. *» Welt als Wille u. Vors., § 61. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 137 

ency to shrink from action the moment that action be- 
comes possible has been the most pronounced, most per- 
plexing tendency. For this reason, he who desires to 
know the meaning of the " I will," is bound to be dis- 
appointed when he searches the record of the volun- 
taristic philosophers, so that it seems almost impossible 
for the individualist of the present day to gather the 
rich harvest of activism, blighted as this was in the day 
of its fruitage. As soon as Taoism had delivered man 
from the world, it imposed upon him the ideal of 
" doing-nothing " ; Yoga, with its philosophy of work, 
was equally serious in its injunction to worklessness ; 
Aristotelian morality, which started out boldly with the 
notion of energy as the most satisfactory thing in the 
life of man, came to the conclusion that after all it is 
the " energy of contemplation " which marks the sum- 
mit of man's life in its ascent to godhead; Kantian 
morality, with its much-heralded freedom of the will, 
allowed the ethical ego one precious moment of auto- 
nomy and then delivered it to the mercies of the cate- 
gorical imperative; Fichte's ego posits itself only to 
become passive in the absolutistic turn which this vol- 
untarist gave to the human self. Hence, Geulincx and 
Schopenhauer seem to be no exception to the rule that, 
the more the self makes of itself, the less it becomes; 
the more the will is freed, the less liberty does it enjoy. 
Indeed, under the auspices of naturalism and deter- 
minism, where the world of sense is given over to the 
sons of men, there is more appreciable freedom of living 
than in idealistic and libertarian systems which grant 
all freedom in theory only to yield none in practice. 
Voluntarism, as this appears more vividly and con- 
cretely in Milton and Blake, in Stendhal and Stirner, 
in Wagner and Nietzsche, is a disappointment, an In- 
Vain, as Nietzsche called it. 

In the failure to assert through action that will which 



138 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the voluntarist has affirmed in thought, the apostle of 
will has ever been under the shadow of a rationalistic 
philosophy which has long assumed the supremacy of 
humanity and reason. Because of its naive assump- 
tions, voluntarism has thus been led to treat the will as 
Abraham his only-begotten; can the individualistic angel 
stay the sword? At the moment when the will was 
idealized it was destined to become an object of sacri- 
fice, an act in which appears the exquisite paradox of 
all voluntaristic systems. The thought that seems to 
have been uppermost in the mind of the voluntarist was 
to the effect that, although self-initiative was the dear- 
est of voluntaristic ideals, the deliberate sacrifice of this 
principle might be even dearer, while life itself might 
proceed will-less, as Israel might somehow come into 
existence apart from Isaac. If much learning can make 
one mad, much reasoning make one irrational, much 
willing may perhaps make one will-less; from the ex- 
tremes of assertion and denial, the will of individualism 
has been called upon to suffer. Much as individualism 
believes in the will, individualism does not delude itself 
into thinking that the effect of willing is so likely to be 
exaggerated by any initiative which the ego may ex- 
press; to individualism, although the fate of the will in 
the world is a subject of limitless importance, the actual 
will of the individual is far from being the omnipotent 
will-to-live of Schopenhauer, nor does individualism find 
it possible to exercise the belief that the individual has 
such a wealth of willing at his command that he may 
either assert or deny the initiative within him. To have 
that initiative and to rejoice in its thrills are indeed the 
privileges which individualism sees fit to express, but 
the power to take one's life up or lay one's life down 
is a power to which individualism does not lay confident 
claim. Such idealistic supremacy is something which 
the individual of the day cannot assume. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 139 

Since individualism must admit that scientism has the 
upper hand, while the egoistic initiative has been forced 
into a position painfully secondary, individualism is not 
ready to indulge in the noble excesses of a renunciatory 
philosophy. Indeed, the individualist feels that, so slen- 
der is his hold on what he calls the will, he is in no 
position to consecrate the noble act of self-negation, 
even if he thought this might be wise and just. To 
assert or to deny the will ethically is to have complete 
possession of the will metaphysically, so that the average 
person does neither the one nor the other; the average 
person, whom individualism would convert to the doc- 
trine of being one's self, lets the will merely slip through 
his hands, neither holding on nor letting go. Of the 
two tendencies, the realizing by means of self-assertion 
and the renouncing through self -negation, the self-asser- 
torial seems the better one for the individualist, inas- 
much as the forces of his world are all making for the 
materialized mass rather than for the punctuated form 
of individualized existence. Where the rationalistic 
presumption of man's supremacy may tend to produce 
self-negation, the realistic situation as appreciated by 
the egoist of the day warns the individual that he must 
assert himself. Hence the terrors of self-willing, as 
these showed themselves to Oriental and Pagan thinkers, 
to Geulincx and Schopenhauer, have little or no mean- 
ing to the individualist who feels no fear of thrusting 
the will out beyond the proper limits of his essential 
being. Scientism will take care of the negative side of 
man's volitions, so that individualism would better exer- 
cise concern for his individual welfare as the one who 
wills himself. 

But it was not merely a superior conception of the 
world as a world of reason which persuaded the indi- 
vidualist to restrain his efforts of self-assertion; in 
company with this superior idea of the outer world 



i 4 o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

there went an inferior conception of the will which was 
to exert itself. From this twofold eighteenth-century 
prejudice, the superiority of reason and the inferiority 
of the self, one strives in vain to be free. Yet individ- 
ualism realizes that, if the bright dream of reasonable- 
ness has not faded, the supremacy of pure thought has 
become obscured so that one may not count too much 
upon the possession of that which Cartesians and 
Kantians so confidently affirmed. But, where intellect- 
ualism has been waning, individualism has been wax- 
ing; whence, if the understanding is at a low ebb, the 
ego is coming to its flood tide. The ego of egoism, far 
removed from the alleged ego of rationalism, is now 
something more than a bit of rationality or sensuality; 
the ego of current individualism has become the sup- 
porter of the whole inner life with its ideals of beauty, 
worth, and truth. For this reason, individualism ad- 
vances its first principle with the feeling that self-asser- 
tion means the assertion of those ideal interests for 
which the self stands, ideals of joy, value, and truth. 
Hence, the belief in the individualistic initiative really 
amounts to a belief in the affirmation of those things 
which are dear to the ego, soul-states, initiatives, and 
ideals. What once belonged to the objective world of 
reason has now become the possession of the subjective 
world of selfhood; and, with this new content, the ego's 
attempt at self-assertion can never again be confused 
with abstract self-cogitating or concrete self-loving. 

With the new estimates which individualism has 
placed upon action, the situation is just the opposite 
of that which once obtained. Where once, with the 
superiority of intellect and the inferiority of will in 
mind, the Enlightenment said, Man is capable but not 
worthy of willing, the age of culture declares, Man is 
certainly worthy of willing, but it is a question whether 
he is capable of it. The will of Emerson and Ibsen, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 141 

of Wagner and Nietzsche, should have self-expression 
in the world; but is the world so constituted that such 
self-expression is possible? Is the metaphysics of voli- 
tion on a par with the ethics of willing, so that self- 
expression shall find its place in the world of work? 
Suppose, then, one abandon the almost meaningless con- 
ception of action which obtained in the rationalistico- 
sensuous Enlightenment, and centre his attention upon 
the more sincere and characteristic notion of work as 
this has appeared in the age of culture; will it not 
appear as though the world should make room for such 
work; will it not appear further that the world, as 
organized by scientism, has made room for nothing 
more than the functional conception of activity? If 
we grant that the will has shown itself to be worthy, 
may we not assume that there is an appropriate realm 
in which this worth may display itself? 

That such a realm of true volition is not to be found 
in the physical view of the world must appear to any 
one who will take the time to compare the ideals of 
individualism with the principles of scientific thinking. 
Because of the world's singular unfitness for the human 
ego, the human ego working for the first time in a self- 
conscious, self-willed manner, has made a world of its 
own, the world of immoralism of such unhappy repute. 
Before one can appreciate the gravity with which the 
individualist laid the foundations of his own world, the 
ideals which impelled him to abandon the world of sci- 
entism must be duly considered. The simple fact that 
some kind of action does express itself- in some kind 
of a world-order is not the same as the serious ideal 
which assures one that genuine action should express 
itself in an appropriate cosmos. In the ancient world 
of things, there was indeed an objective realm, but it 
did not suffice to contain the Christian who had dreamed 
of things better and more spiritual; of such spiritual- 



142 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

izing ego the world was unworthy. Now, because again 
the human self is surrounded by the physical order, it 
does not follow that he can find his home there. The 
primitive Christian promptly repudiated the cosmos 
which he found enveloping him, and for a while h,e 
went on his way worldless, cheered by the thought that 
inwardly he was possessed of something more worthy 
than the world-order had to offer him; but the time 
came when he too elaborated his own world-order, the 
world of spirit peculiar to Scholastic times. Will the 
new individual be so brave as to reject the cosmos of 
things physical which surrounds him; will he at last be 
able to find his own world? 

That which the individual in the age of culture asks 
of the surrounding order is a true place, a place for 
his mind as well as a mere location for his body. The 
individual can indeed retreat to his inward self, as his 
aestheticism has led him to withdraw from the physical 
order so that he may have soul-states of his own in all 
their decadent aestheticism; perhaps, this same fate will 
be found to overtake him when, in the pursuit of a 
world which shall possess the freedom of individual 
initiative, he shall deem it fit to retire once more to the 
inward self where, in immoralistic manner, he shall use 
his initiative as a mere will-to-selfhood. The physical 
order does not permit action as such; on that point the 
individual can no longer remain in doubt. That which 
the physical order of ambitious scientism does allow 
and advise is something automatic rather than free, 
functional rather than creative. Under the auspices of 
scientism, which finds no place for the human initiative, 
the fact remains that creative work goes on in the realm 
of art, of moral ideals, of religious beliefs; but, while 
these are actually in the world of scientism, they are 
not of the world. Between the free creations of the 
human will, aesthetic, moral, and religious, and the 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 143 

physical order, the worst of contradictions prevail. The 
recent history of culture has witnessed the rise and 
development of artistic, ethical, and religious ideas at 
once independent, self-contained, and intelligible; yet 
there is nothing in the actual history of thought, as this 
is represented by authoritarian scientism, to justify the 
elaboration of these ideals. Undoubtedly, there are also 
a scientific art, a scientific ethics, and a scientific relig- 
ion, however contradictory is the relation of the adjec- 
tive to the substantive; but who can doubt which of the 
two, the cultural or the scientific, is the true form of 
spiritual life? Even if one show such bad judgment as 
to prefer the scientific product to the cultural one, he 
cannot deny that the cultural one is none the less a fact 
with which he must settle; and this settlement with the 
freer creations of the human will can hardly be made 
after the genial manner of a scientism which attempts 
to call all non-scientific forms of culture " degenerate." 
It is the deviation from the scientific type, rather than 
the type itself, which persists in calling attention to 
itself as culture indeed; excluded from the orthodox 
realm of science, this spontaneous culture still exists 
and continues to expand its borders, to intensify its 
ideals. 

The automatic and functional form of action, adopted 
by scientism for the sake of pursuing its evolutionary 
analogies of organic existence in general, does not for 
a moment explain the data presented by complete ex- 
perience. Experience does indeed present many exam- 
ples of automatic activities peculiar to general bodily 
movement, breathing, and special muscular movements 
of the hands. But these simple and obvious forms of 
activity are far removed from the free creations of the 
will in the form of action as action. Spencer's defi- 
nition of conduct as " the aggregate of interdependent 
acts performed by an organism " is an example of the 



144 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

candor which can pervade a scientism which has aban- 
doned the idea that there is something extraordinary 
about the human species. It is true that scientism, with 
its social affiliations does attempt to explain the behavior 
of man; but scientific investigations and speculations in 
the realm of things humanistic have usually if not wholly 
confined themselves to anthropological data peculiar to 
primitive man. Granted that scientism explains the life 
and activity of primitive man, which itself is an open 
question, it is still more evident that such scientism has 
done no more by way of explaining the man of perfected 
culture than to call him degenerate. Where the Enlight- 
enment studied nature apart from history, and the man 
of perfected culture and civilization was not disturbed, 
the affairs of the human self were not unsatisfactory; 
but where, with the coming of the nineteenth century, 
both nature and human history were made the twin 
objects of investigation, the naturalistic soon overcame 
the humanistic, which latter appears in no other light 
than that of anthropology. In the case of man as man, 
the scientific conception of conduct fails to suffice; not 
because man's conduct is of a marvellous character, but 
because it is marked by the initiative, the improvising, 
the creating, out of which the cultural products of art 
and religion have come. To view these cultural cre- 
ations as functional processes, to regard artistic cre- 
ations and moral performances as a part of the " aggre- 
gate of the interdependent acts of an organism," is to 
reduce scientism to an absurdity. The attempt to social- 
ize science or to make sociality scientific has been the 
undoing of scientism; so that who can deny that Comte 
and Spencer have made scientism appear silly? Evi- 
dence to this effect should be found in the swarm of 
sociologists who have attempted the disastrous com- 
bination of the physical and humanistic. 

That individualism should thus have become anti- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 145 

scientific and even anti-natural, as with the Decadents 
and Symbolists, should occasion no great alarm and 
Still less surprise. Is the ego to remain silent when the 
prevailing type of intellectual life is such as to negate 
that which he feels to be most characteristic of his 
being? Individualism, which at times has rashly in- 
sisted upon the monstrous, the vicious, and the unnat- 
ural, is interested in nothing so much as that which may 
be called strictly human; and if an individualist in par- 
ticular, repelled by scientism and rejoicing in the thought 
that there is something in him different from the purely 
anthropological, does overdo the affair with Baude- 
lairean or Nietzschean exaggeration, all that one need 
gather from such a performance is the secure thought 
that the individualistic initiative is practically boundless 
and incalculable. Persuaded that human life has a value 
of its own, the individualist has insisted upon the invio- 
lability of his own impulses; his volitional excesses in 
the direction of diabolism may be taken as exceptional 
means of proving the point in question. 

3. The Demands of 1 Immorausm 

In the struggle for the worth of life, the essential 
conflict appears when the contrast between the func- 
tional and initiatory is made. The individualist can find 
no value in any course of conduct which does not spring 
from a strong, self-impelled " I will," so that he is 
forced to turn aside from the genial paths of scientism 
and make his way alone. Where the desire for the 
inward joy of life, which could not be found in the 
drab hedonic pleasure-pain, made inevitable the recourse 
to a relentless aestheticism, the demand for value in life 
will be found to lead to a vigorous immoralism. The 
naturalistic conception of man could afford the ego 
nothing higher than an automatic response to the ob- 
jective demands of the scientific arrangement of society, 



146 THE GROUND AND GOAD OF HUMAN LIFE 

whence the individualist took the matter in his own 
hands and thus sought to lay down the principles of 
life in a hypernomian immoralism. Such " immoral- 
ism " often appears to amount to no more than mere 
transgression, in thought if not in deed; but the essen- 
tial principles of the immoralist are ever found in 
strength and inwardness, which strong assertion from 
within contrasts most strikingly with weak submission 
to that which is without. Where opposition enters into 
the ethical calculations of the immoralist, the non-con- 
formity and disobedience involved are secondary to the 
principle of self-assertion; immoralism has no desire to 
recognize the alleged authority of those standards which 
are set up by scientific thinking, even when this recog- 
nition appears in the form of resistance. The supreme 
moment of individualism lies in the autonomous " I 
will." 

In contrasting the ethical attitude of scientism with 
that of individualism, it would seem as though scientism, 
with its usual attitude of opposition to all idealism, would 
negate both the metaphysical and the moral ideals of 
orthodox thought ; but this is not the case. Scientism, 
which was ready to remove ideals, has never found it 
expedient to efface the moral sanctions which followed 
from those spiritual ideals; scientism did make rigorous 
use of its agnostic theory for the purpose of removing 
the spiritual world from the natural order, but scientism 
did not care to do away with the influence which came 
from that spiritual world. The scientists have removed 
the Good One, but the good remains. In the Enlighten- 
ment, nothing seemed more important than the removal 
of the orthodox Deity; yet, where rationalism opposed 
theism, it was unwilling to set aside the ethics which 
had followed from theistic belief. At the climax of the 
rationalistic period, Kant was found dismissing the Deity 
but holding fast, and that with extraordinary vigor, to 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 147 

the Deity's law of duty. If, therefore, the physical con- 
ceptions of religion were called upon to suffer at the 
hands of the rationalistic scientists, the ethical concep- 
tions of religion were either left untouched or actually 
furthered. The intellectualistic courage of the modern 
has thus been accompanied by immoralistic cowardice. 
In the later period of modern thought, at once nat- 
uralistic and cultural, scientism has been even more 
determined in saying " no " to the idealizing intellect 
while saying " yes " to the moralizing will. Scientism 
is thus innocent of immoralism. Why scientism should 
have performed a half -work only, is another question; 
yet there should be no doubt that scientism was content 
to destroy certain accepted forms of thinking, while it 
remained more than loyal to equally traditional forms 
of action. In the case of such authoritarian thinkers as 
Comte and Darwin, Haeckel and Spencer, the attitude 
of ferocity toward ideas spiritual is accompanied by an 
attitude of extreme mildness toward spiritual motives, 
such as obedience, sympathy, and good-behavior. For 
this reason, one can discover little difference in moral 
value between Christian ethics and the ethical ideals of 
scientism. What one had the right to expect of sci- 
entism, after scientism had made short work of the soul 
and the Deity, was the origination and elaboration of a 
morale of appropriate blindness and cruelty, so that those 
who look for great things from scientism have a right 
to claim that scientism is, when ethically considered, a 
great disappointment, if not a great deception. Comte 
fails to carry out in ethics the bold worldliness of his 
positivist physics; Darwin's bloody struggle for exist- 
ence finds no place in his domestic ethics of " socia- 
bility " ; Haeckel's animalism ends before he draws his 
ethical conclusions; Spencer's Unknowable allows him 
to perfect an ethics of which the physically knowable 
was quite innocent. This saintliness of scientism should 



10 



148 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

be noted down as one of the surprises, one of the dis- 
appointments of the nineteenth century. 

Alas! the docility of the brave, the weakness of the 
strong. Did they imagine, Kant the finisher of the 
eighteenth century, Spencer that of the nineteenth, that 
they had done enough? Did they fear to destroy both 
God and godliness? Egoism cares nought for these 
historical enigmas; for egoism, while less pretentious 
and less inclined to promise, has done the work that 
all-vaunted scientism failed and feared to take up, the 
work of setting aside the moral law. Scientism, with 
its eighteenth-century abstractness and nineteenth- cen- 
tury concreteness, has always sighed for order, which 
was for it the first law of earth as once it had been the 
first law of heaven ; scientism thus postulated a morality 
of reason, a morality of knowableness. In the latter 
period of scientism, this desire for order appears in the 
strange reverence for the " species," the only shred of 
rationality left in the de-idealized world of things. To 
the claims of the species, all must submit, hence the 
sociability of Darwinism, the sociality of Spencer's ethics. 
The human species thus became society, when it became 
easy to conclude that the moral is the social, the immoral 
the anti-social. Individualism has never felt excessive 
regard for any impersonal order, and it is still less likely 
to feel this awe when the moral order becomes the 
species or herd. The self is more than a specimen. 

Whence this dread of the human self, this fear of 
the self when it indulges in an aesthetic withdrawal 
from the world to the inwardness of its soul-states, this 
hatred of the ego which proceeds from within outward 
toward its own " immoralistic " goal? Scientism must 
explain its own timidity; meanwhile, scientism must ad- 
mit that, where it failed to indulge in an ethical assert- 
iveness peculiar to its own principles, art went forward 
and postulated its own morale, where scientism abode 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 149 

by spiritual ideals of life. In the name of Romanticism, 
both Schleiermacher and Schlegel sought to set aside 
the moralic restrictions of an ethics based upon the 
exteriority of scientific thinking. Was Schleiermacher 
an immoralist when he emancipated religion by saying, 
" Piety can never be an instinct craving for a mess of 
metaphysical and moral crumbs " ; 30 was he likewise an 
irrationalist ? Schleiermacher was rather the individual- 
ist who sought in religion the free expression of the inner 
life apart from the restraints of morality. Schlegel was 
no more intense; perhaps he was less convincing. With 
Schlegel, all genuine morality was to be found in spon- 
taneity : Alle Originalit'dt ist moralisch; 31 such morality 
must initiate its expression in opposition : Die erste Re- 
gung der Sittlichkeit ist Opposition gegen die Gesetz- 
lichkeit. 32 This attitude of opposition to the moral law 
as an established thing casts the romanticist back upon 
the self, the assertion of which leads to the individual- 
istic doctrine of Ironie, the Ironie for which Schlegel 
was famous, die Ironie der Ironie. 33 But this romantic 
despair of the self was far from being one with the 
scientific fear of the ego; with Romanticism, the self 
was all, even when the self was nothing. 

It would indeed sound strange were one to affirm that 
science lacked the strength which culture enjoyed and 
expressed; yet some such affirmation must be made. 
Perhaps the cultural affirmation of the will's inherent 
worth was made possible by the scientific perception 
that the human ego owes naught to the artificially organ- 
ized world of institutions; yet the attitude of the artist 
of the nineteenth century was more naturalistic than 
scientific. The raw naturalism which science had treated 
with ethical evasion was destined to become the funda- 
mental principle and leading motive of an art which 

30 Discourses on Religion, tr. Oman, II. 

31 Ideen, 60 Jugend Schriften, ed. Minor. 

33 Athenaeum, 425. & Jugend Schriften, II, 392. 



150 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

should seek to set aside the limitations of exterior 
law. Did Stendhal and Emerson, did Dostoievsky and 
Nietzsche, make use of the physics of scientism to de- 
stroy the ethics of scientism, and was such scientism 
the "fear and evasion of pessimism"? Scientism has 
no culture for the upbuilding of the human soul; hence 
scientism cannot further the soul in the latter's attempt 
at self-realization. It was art then which was to come 
to the relief of the self-asserting ego; and, where the 
scientific treatise could not avail, the romantic novel was 
made the medium of emancipation. Scientism has done 
nothing for the human atom ; that atom has had to work 
out its own salvation by means of art. It was art which 
in its unique freedom taught the human self to make 
use of culture as a means of self-emancipation, and this 
culture was, alas ! connected with crime. 

In the self -valuing individual, culture and crime, or 
culture through crime, were the foci of that immoralism 
which individualists made use of in seeking the worth 
of life. So intimate is the connection between the cul- 
tural and the criminal that Nietzsche's dual derivation 
of the principles in question cannot fail to provide sug- 
gestions. According to the reasoning of this immoral- 
ist, both Semite and Aryan had the fate to establish the 
bond between self-development within and sin without. 
In the story of Eve, the serpent conveys the idea that 
the fruit of the precious tree, instead of affording mere 
passing pleasure, had the effect of awakening the mind 
to the knowledge of ethical distinctions which the Deity 
had reserved for Himself. Enlightenment and disobedi- 
ence, culture and crime thus went hand in hand. In the 
Aryan mind, with the masculine myth of Prometheus, 
the secret of heaven was to be learned by sinful dis- 
obedience only; so that the sin of the Aryan man was 
one with the transgression of the Semitic woman. 34 It 

3i The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Haussman, § 9. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 151 

was in the aesthetic recognition of the blind will, the 
impetuous " I will," as a means of exceptional ethical 
enlightenment, that Nietzsche was led to seek in the 
Wagnerian opera the restoration of the " barbaric and 
titanic " as these had been felt by the ancients before 
the will was silenced by formal intellectualism. Where, 
in matters of superior ethics, science has been silent, art 
has been correspondingly eloquent. 

Scientism has recognized the need of the individual- 
istic " I will," and, where the demands of the human 
self have been observed, they have promptly been filled 
by the old hedonism in a more scientific form ; " scien- 
tific hedonism " of Spencerian fame has been at once 
the worst and the best that scientism has had to offer. 
Then, in another vein, scientism showed its ability 
to imitate when Darwin took the eighteenth-century 
conscience of Butler and submitted it to scientific inter- 
pretation. For some reason which aesthetics must sup- 
ply, the artistic consciousness of the nineteenth century 
could find no joie de vivre in the biological sense of 
beneficial pleasure, could feel no detent in the new bio- 
logical conscience. Reduced to its final point of an- 
alysis, anti-scientific immoralism has placed its affair 
upon the ideal of strength, the inward strength of a 
self asserting " I will." Aesthetic Milton was aware of 
the possibilities of strength when he made his Satan 
say, " To be weak is to be miserable " ; and Blake sup- 
plied the positive counterpart of such Satanism by add- 
ing, " Energy is eternal delight." When contemporary 
scientific ethics comes forward with its social, cud- 
chewing animal, it is probably unaware of the fact that 
the beast of prey has not been wholly exterminated. 
The scientific lion is thus found eating straw like the ox. 

Strength was thus the categorical imperative of im- 
moralistic individualism in its development from Milton 
to Neitzsche. In postulating such a principle as im- 



152 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



perative for the self-asserting ego, immoralism never 
expressed itself in such a manner as to justify the iden- 
tification of itself with mere immorality. What the 
immoralist does, is not to transgress the law but to 
repudiate the law, to rise above the common ethical 
distinction between good and bad. Where this " good " 
becomes equivalent to the social, the " bad " to the anti- 
social, the task of ethical elevation is not supposed to 
appear difficult; and, if the egoist is ever guilty of 
wrong, his is the sin of intellect rather than of will. 
Scientism has been all but able to cast the social net 
about those whose idealistic morality abounded in the 
sense of submission and tenderness; but the scientific 
net has been spread in vain in the sight of the artistic 
bird. Artistic morality with its prejudice for genuine 
values has not been inclined to exchange the self for 
the species, worth for utility, humanity for society; so 
that artistic morality is found just outside the gray 
scientific wall. The method of immoralism may have 
been severe, but it would seem as though no sincere 
believer in the true worth of life could regret the 
romantic revolt of the human ego. Perhaps something 
more than mere " strength " will be found necessary 
for investing morality with a content, but the eman- 
cipation of morality could hardly have been brought 
about in any other manner; to be hard, impassible, and 
destructive were moralic methods due to the exigencies 
of the case. 

Romanticism had not been guilty of mere aestheticism 
with its ironical delight in mere soul-states and its harm- 
less maxim of art for art's sake. In the midst of these 
aestheticisms, the sterner stuff of self-assertiveness had 
made its fibre felt. The English poetry of Milton and 
Blake had prepared the way; but, without reference to 
more classical immoralism, the romantic school pro- 
ceeded to assert the " I will." Schlegel may have 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 153 

seemed more eccentric than unethical, his Lucinde more 
startling than convincing. The realistic school was less 
declamatory; and, with its preference for action, it gave 
the new ego a will, and made him a self-propelled 
creature in the real world. At the same time, the living, 
active immoralist of realism was lacking in clearness, 
so that his motives were to be more inferred than 
observed. From Schlegel to Stendhal-Beyle, the aes- 
thetic connection as seen by criticism must appear some- 
what less clear than the ethical bond apparent to indi- 
vidualism. What Schlegel's character had felt, that 
Stendhal's hero did. Beylism is a philosophy of im- 
moralism, is marked by the absence of all expected 
ideals; even if the reader of beylisme cannot find in 
the premises the subject and predicate which leap forth 
stark and strong in the conclusion, he has a right to 
believe that they are there. The title, Red and Black, 
symbolic of army and church, is suggestive of the 
ethical vigor and sternness of the immoralistic author. 
Owing to Beyle's habit of following a sort of Cartesian 
spiritual automatism, the aesthetic method assumes a 
pragmatic character, while the romantic is silenced by 
the realistic. As Maurice Hewlett said of Stendhal, in 
his preface to the translation of La Chartreuse de Parma, 
he was " a man of fire cloaked in ice." In other words, 
the individualism of Beyle, wanting in the enthusiasm 
of the Romantic school and not yet ripe for the cruel- 
ties of the Decadence, represents the individual as one 
who is impassible in his social relations; he is silent 
toward them because they make no appeal to his indi- 
viduating consciousness. The egoistic asbestos with 
which Stendhal thus protects the individualism of his 
characters was destined, however, to assume a different 
form and function in later individualism; Baudelaire 
reassumes it in his ideal of impassibilite, whereby the 
ego is led to look with apathy upon the feelings and 



I 5 4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

needs of others; Nietzsche popularizes it in his maxim, 
" Be hard ! " 

The sclerotic character of selfhood, as it was indi- 
cated by Beyle, was apparently the place where indi- 
vidualistic immoralism had its beginning. And yet, had 
it not been for the development of the Decadence, it 
might safely be assumed that the indifference to the 
moral ideal, as this is shown in the delineation of the 
Duchess Gina's personality in La Chartreuse, would 
have meant no more than Prevost's Manon Lescaut, 
who has yet to be connected with the immoralistic move- 
ment. Manon failed to find a place among the indi- 
vidualists for the reason that she had none of the intro- 
spective equipment of L,ucinde, while she was equally 
wanting in the will-to-selfhood so conspicuous in the 
Duchess Gina. Manon sinned, but did not find her self- 
hood in sin. Hence, while we may restrace the history 
of immoralistic individualism back to Beyle, we are not 
justified in pursuing a regressus which should leave us 
in the middle of the eighteenth century. 

The immoralism of Stendhal consists, not so much 
in a direct opposition to the moral ideal, as in a cool 
analysis of motives as these spring from the will as 
such; with his admiration for Napoleon, a character 
which was destined to inspire the immoralism of Dos- 
toievsky's Raskolnikow, Stendhal pursues the psychology 
of volition as if ethical norms had no existence. His 
philosophic aim was expressed in his own words, when 
he said, " I seek to recount with truth and clearness 
that which passes within my own heart." 35 With this 
ideal for himself as writer, Stendhal creates characters 
which are capable of the most intimate powers of intro- 
spection so far as their volitional states are concerned. 
This voluntaristic introspectiveness which, in such a 
novel as La Chartreuse de Parma, leads the character 

35 Bourget, Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine, 271. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 155 

to consult with his own motives, involves constant use 
of such expressions as, " He said to himself," " she 
mused," " they said to themselves." They are not con- 
fined to the hero, as the criticism of Bourget would 
suggest, but all the characters, from the prince to the 
servant, indulge the introspection of the will; if it does 
not amount to obsession, as Bourget asserts, 36 it finds 
the author so engrossed with his desire to discover 
motives that he must make use of the il se dit some 
two hundred times. To act naturally and with strength, 
and to reflect clearly upon that which passes in the 
mind, seem to have taken the place of morality with 
Stendhal's Beylism. His own character that of warrior 
and lover, the poles of his philosophy are found to con- 
sist in the sense of power and pleasure; all that can 
restrain him is the inner lack of ability to arrive at his 
desired end, and this restraint has about it no sense of 
moral detention. But the immoralism of Stendhal had 
nothing obtrusive about it; a generation later, Dostoiev- 
sky placed the self-asserting ego in a more polemical 
position, whence Nietzsche was able to develop his idea 
of the self as the strong one. 

The Beylism of Stendhal, by no means as exaggerated 
as the Satanism of Baudelaire, has much of modern 
immoralism to its credit. To observe the peculiar char- 
acter of Stendhal's ethics, one can do no better than 
contrast his methods with those of his contemporary 
Balzac, who enjoyed far more popularity in his day, 
and who is more likely to be esteemed a classic, even 
where Stendhal was far more subtle and significant. 
With Balzac, who took the world for granted without 
pausing to inquire concerning the final sources of human 
perversity, sin is a fact which we must accept and in 
the delineation of which the realistic writer may exer- 
cise his powers of description to the full. But Balzac 

M Op. cit., 279. 



156 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

does not look upon the human self as setting the law- 
aside in their own wicked sense of sinlessness; he never 
saw beyond an evil act. His Valerie Marneffe, who en- 
joys the distinction of being among the most complete of 
female offenders, never thought to negate the law which 
she so relentlessly violated; hence she is a sinner with- 
out being an immoralist. In the case of Vautrin, in 
Old Goriot, there is indeed some such suggestion of the 
immoralism known to the romantic Schlegel and the 
realistic Stendhal, for this would-be superman saw the 
possible distinction between moralistic submission and 
immoralistic nihilism. Said he to young Rastignac, 
" there are but two alternatives — stupid obedience or 
revolt." In addition to this Stendhalian distinction, 
Balzac's bad man gives the following advice : " Do you 
know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant 
genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut 
your way through the masses of men like a cannon ball, 
or steal among them like a plague." Yet, in this ideal 
of selfhood in success, it is plain that Balzac, whose 
eighteenth-century ethics did not permit him to set his 
artistic seal of approval upon such a morale, is not in 
sympathy with the principle which the hero expresses; 
Balzac merely portrays that which his conservative 
philosophy ' cannot justify. Now Stendhal makes it 
plain that he sides with his sinners, who both transgress 
with their wills and negate with their intellects the law 
that seeks to thwart their impulses and ideas. For this 
reason, we may gather from Stendhal the immoralistic 
data and relations which, when developed by Balzac, 
are but materials which serve for the elaboration of a 
comedie humaine. 

The first clear expression of immoralism as a form 
of individualism, appears in Emerson, who, in advance 
of French Decadents and Russian Nihilists, placed the 
affair of the self upon the naught. In some phases of 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 157 

his doctrine, Emerson is content to set the self in oppo- 
sition to the State, as when he says, " Every actual 
State is corrupt; good men will not obey the laws too 
well " ; 3T and he further speaks of society as " this 
foul compromise, this vituperated Sodom." 3S But this 
rather anarchistic formulation of his individualistic doc- 
trine does not prevent him from repudiating the moral 
law as well as the State. In this antinomianism, or 
" hypernomianism," as he calls it, he insists that, " Good 
and bad are but names very readily transferable to this 
or that; the only right is that which is after my con- 
stitution, the only wrong what is against it." 39 When 
Emerson has observed that the darlings of nature are 
the great, the strong, the beautiful, he is ready for a 
more thoroughly immoralistic expression of his doc- 
trine. Thus he says, " It is an esoteric doctrine of soci- 
ety that a little wickedness is good to make muscle " ; 40 
as the social, so the individualistic, " There is no man 
who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no 
plant that is not fed on manures." 41 The whole tenor 
of Emersonian egoism is that of selfhood in strength, 
the strength which makes the self impassible and hard; 
while Emerson does not imitate either Milton or Blake, 
he pays such tribute to Satanism as to look upon him- 
self as one who, under certain circumstances, might be 
called " The Devil's child." 42 

Science is incapable of the individualistic hardness 
found in Stendhal and Emerson; at heart, science with 
all its attempts at intellectual severity is soft and obedi- 
ent. With its scientific " sociability," Darwinism is a 
fine exemplification of the manner in which intellectual 
rigor may melt before the alleged claims of social mor- 
ality; yet, did not Darwin perhaps long for somewhat of 
that saving hardness with which the egoist had learned 

37 On Politics, in loc. * On the Conservative, in loc. 

39 On Self Reliance, in loc. *> On Power, in loc. 

41 Considerations by the Way, in loc. ** Self Reliance, in loc. 



158 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

to deliver his soul? In spite of his sickness and science, 
Darwin was not unaware of the possible place which the 
human self might occupy and enjoy could that human 
ego feel himself free from the principle of Natural 
Selection which was so domineering in the world of 
organisms in general. In a letter to Asa Gray, written 
September 17th, 1861, Darwin said, " If man were made 
of brass or iron, and in no way connected with any 
other organism which had ever lived, I should perhaps 
be convinced (of design)." The fact that man by 
means of a superior morale might make himself of 
brass or iron, seems never to have occurred to this 
naturalist with his tendresse, but the aesthetic individ- 
ualism of the mid-nineteenth century perfected this 
metallic morality for which Darwin's soul longed. One 
must thus turn from Darwin to Dostoievsky for the 
severe philosophy of life which is to save the soul of 
the individual. 

In placing the iron individual in the actual world 
of men and women, Dostoievsky has the honor, if not 
also the responsibility, of making individualism some- 
thing more than an idea; Stendhal and Emerson merely 
conjectured where Dostoievsky actualized. Before Dos- 
toievsky took up his pen of iron, Turgenieff had pre- 
pared the way for egoism by creating a nihilistic 
atmosphere. As an individualistic doctrine, nihilism 
consisted in repudiating all authority, while the practice 
of the doctrine led to a forceful rejection of all estab- 
lished institutions ; " we," said Turgenieff' s Bazaroff, 
" act by force of that which we recognize as most use- 
ful. At the present time, the most useful thing of all 
is rejection — we reject." 43 Indulging in such senti- 
ments, Bazaroff, the most perfect of Turgenieffian ego- 
ists, came to be known to his youthful disciples as a 
" bird of prey," although there was nothing in the 

43 Fathers and Children, tr. Hapgood, 38, 86. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 159 

actual conduct of the invalid, for such he was, as to 
justify such a departure from the realm of tame birds. 
Dostoievsky differs from Turgenieff and contrasts 
with Darwin in that he calls upon his hero to come out 
of the scientific order which has so benignly created 
man, and assume an attitude of opposition toward it. 
At the same time, the metallic morality of Dostoievsky's 
Raskolnikow, far from being a mere impulse, was based 
upon a conception of life somewhat different in ethical 
significance from the Darwinian biology. Psychologi- 
cally viewed, Raskolnikow was so impulsive as to be 
unable to connect his inner motive with the outer social 
act; but for this weakness his morale of action should 
atone. So imperative was the Individual in and behind 
the actual Raskolnikow that the latter can convey the 
volitions of the former in a manner purely spasmodic. 
" His chin quivered " ; " he set his teeth " ; " he shud- 
dered " ; " he fidgetted " : such were the indications of 
the volitional states which the hero was to transmute 
into vigorous action. 44 Attribute some part of this 
quasi- voluntarism to the abnormality of the man, and 
the rest of it may be understood as temporary weakness 
due to the fact that the act to be performed demands 
too much contrast between ideals of individual worth 
and the norms of the social order. Mere naturalism or 
brute force will not carry him through to the end of 
the terrible deed he is planning, since the " terrible " 
struggle for existence is far from justifying egoistic 
self-assertion; in the philosophy of Dostoievsky, the 
struggle for selfhood results in the elaboration of the 
maxim, " A cultured man has the right to commit 
crime " ; in all this, nothing is said about the scientific 
man. With no special antipathy to scientism, Dos- 
toievsky attempts a bit of anthropology quite alien to 
anything in Darwinism. Upon the basis of this im- 

44 Cf. M. De Vogue, Russian Novelists, 187. 



160 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

moralistic biology, Raskolnikow is allowed to commit 
his " crime," although the nihilism of Dostoievsky's art 
is such as to lead to the conclusion, " There is no crime." 
So important is the rationale of the culture- criminal, 
that its ipsissima verba deserve exact repetition and 
careful consideration: 

Men are divided into ordinary and extraordinary men. The 
former must live in a state of obedience, and have no right to 
break the law, inasmuch as they are nothing more than ordinary 
men; the latter have a right to commit every kind of crime, 
and to break every law, from the fact that they are extraor- 
dinary men. . . . All legislators and rulers of men, commenc- 
ing with the earliest down to Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napo- 
leon, etc., have one and all been criminals, for, while giving 
new laws, they have naturally broken through older ones which 
had been faithfully observed by society and transmitted by its 
progenitors. These men most certainly never hesitated to shed 
blood, as soon as they saw the advantage of doing so. It may 
even be remarked that nearly all these benefactors of humanity 
have been terribly bloodthirsty. . . . 

Nature divides men into two categories : the first an inferior 
one, comprising ordinary men, the kind whose material function 
it is to reproduce specimens like themselves ; the other, a superior 
one, comprising men who have the gift or power to make a new 
word, thought, or deed, felt. . . . To the first belong in a gen- 
eral way, conservatives, men of order, who live in a state of 
obedience and love it. . . . The next class, however, consists 
exclusively of men who break the law, or strive, according to 
their capacity or power, to do so. . . . The first group is always 
predominant in the present ; the second, however, is master of 
the future. One class keeps up the world by increasing its inhab- 
itants, the other arouses humanity and makes it act. Both have 
absolutely the same right to exist, yea, even to the day of the 
New Jerusalem. 45 

While, in all this, the general idea of criminal resist- 
ance and repudiation of the established order stands in 
the foreground, the morale of Dostoievsky, doing away 
with crime and upholding culture as it does, tempers 
itself to the extent of limiting such cultured criminality 
to the superior man, while even he, instead of pursuing 
his own interests alone, is supposed to usher in a better 
day. As reformer, Dostoievsky offers severe contrast 

46 Crime and Punishment, Part III, Ch. V. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 161 

to most other egoists, Stendhal, Emerson, Baudelaire, 
Stirner, Nietzsche; yet it must not be overlooked that, 
with Raskolnikow, the " Day of the New Jerusalem" 
was never anything more than a sentiment, for it was 
the present which claimed him as its own. Moreover, 
Dostoievsky's immoralist was unable to abide by the 
metallic rigor of his original resolution; so that finally 
one sees him confessing that, instead of being the man 
of bronze who can affirm the act of his will, he is but 
flesh and blood after all. 46 

The career of subsequent immoralism is significant of 
the same opposition to that same social order to whose 
relief chivalrous scientism has so lately come and that 
in true Quixotic fashion. Ibsen was not quite himself 
when, in 1863, he wrote The Pretenders, in which 
Skule has his " great king's-thought " to carry through. 
Where the Pretender fails to seize his throne, others 
are more intrepid, if not more successful. These true 
Ibsenesque egos win the victory over the private intellect 
where perhaps they are unable to overcome the public 
will. According to Nora Helmer of Doll's House, a 
woman's first duty is toward herself as a human being, 
while she should seek to discover which is right, society 
or the self. According to Helen Alving, who fought 
her Ghosts, all morality is so machine-sewn that the 
whole affair unravels with the untying of a single knot, 
while law and order are responsible for all the mischief 
in the world. Hilda Wangel, the immoraliste who criti- 
cized the Master Builder, has no patience with " sickly 
conscience," and prefers the " ideals of a ruffian" ; 
herself a " light-haired little devil," she is almost, but 
not altogether, ready to seize the tower of selfhood. 
As there is in Ibsen no place for scientific morality in 
which the ego is but a specimen of the species, so later 
immoralism has the same lesson for the searcher after 

49 Crime and Punishment, Part III, Ch. VI. 



1 62 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ideals. According to Schiller, man is only completely 
man when he plays; according to Sudermann, one is 
only one's self when one sins. Such was the case with 
Paul Meyerhoeffer in Dame Care, with Regina in Cat's 
Bridge, with Magda in Die Heimat. " We must sin if 
we wish to grow " ; so concludes Magda, whose musical 
culture, like that of Evelyn Inness, came only through 
sexual crime. With all self-asserting egos, it is the 
belief in life's worth which leads to the immoralistic 
program; it is culture which permits crime. With all 
this dissonance, Wilde chimed in to make the solution 
of the music still more difficult. " One can fancy an 
intense personality created out of sin," says he. 47 Later, 
Wilde preferred to consider culture alone rather than 
crime alone as the true means of self-realization; thus 
he says, " Crime, which under certain circumstances 
may seem to have created individualism, must take cog- 
nizance of other people, and interfere with them." 48 
Culture is thus more individualistic than crime; hence 
it is better for individuating purposes. 

To state the cause of immoralism is not to explain it, 
to explain is not to justify. Yet, in stating the fact 
that a century of immoralism insisted upon the worth 
of the self even when that simple assertion was to 
involve non-scientific culture and anti-scientific crime, 
is to explain that these methods were deemed necessary 
for a self surrounded by the narrow synthesis in which 
the individual was but a specimen of the species; the 
justification must be more general. If it be assumed 
that the human self shall be environed by a world-order 
framed upon certain ideas drawn as conclusions from 
the study of nature, it does not follow that contem- 
porary scientific conclusions are the most suitable ones. 
The ego may indeed be destined to repose in solitari- 
ness; but, if we assume that the human self must have 

^Intentions, 88. a Soul of Man Under Socialism, in loc. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 163 

some kind of world, it is to be hoped that a more liberal 
study of the natural order will effect a higher synthesis 
in the light of which the self may find its home in the 
natural order. Where scientism is not sufficient unto 
the needs of the self, it may still be shown that the self 
may find its place in that which is greater than sci- 
entism: namely, Nature. 

III. THE STRUGGLE FOR THE TRUTH OF LIFE 

In considering the final form of the struggle for self- 
hood, it might seem as though the principle of truth 
left room for none of the dispute attendant upon the 
more plastic notions of joy and worth. Where we may 
have such joys as we will and elaborate such values as 
we chose, we are not permitted to frame truths of self- 
hood, because truth has a certain rigidity about it. 
Toward truth, our attitude should be one of obeisance; 
for, where we may perhaps assume mastery over joys 
and values, it is truth which rules us. Were we speak- 
ing of absolute truth, this would indeed be the case, 
just as the presence of absolute joy or absolute worth 
might be regarded as something commanding perfect 
submission on our part; but, since our concern is with 
truth as applied to life, we feel that we have here some- 
what the same freedom enjoyed by individualistic aes- 
thetics and ethics. By means of certain adjectival 
truths, we speak of scientific truth and religious truth, 
so that we are justified in making use of the expression, 
" individualistic truth," or the truth of the self. It is 
with the adjectival qualification that we have to do, so 
that one cannot say that, inasmuch as scientific truth 
has been established in this or that manner, we cannot 
hope to establish an individualistic truth in opposition 
to it. Yet, it is fair to assume that truth may be as 
friendly to one form of culture as to another; whence 
there is no reason to feel that the goddess of truth, 

11 



164 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

having expressed a preference for scientism, will spurn 
the advances of individualism. Thus, the position of 
individualism in this third question is not unlike its 
position in connection with the other two; where indi- 
vidualism sought for the joy of life in soul-states, for 
the worth of life in independent initiatives, it may pro- 
ceed to search for the truth of life in the self-assertion 
of the human ego. 

i. The Truth op Selfhood 

As is the case with almost all the phases of individ- 
ualism, one must look back with pathos to the Enlight- 
enment, when, with the self in its possession, the age 
was unaware of wealth, and promptly squandered it 
upon the world and the social order. The individualism 
of the day, far from rejoicing in the self-knowledge of 
Descartes, cannot claim to have even a Socratic hold 
upon the self. But, if the self is not known, it does 
not follow that individualism has been forced to aban- 
don its claim that the self will be found true, nor must 
one draw the lamentable corollary that, since the world 
is known, therefore one must accept the world as the 
truth. Descartes was sure of the self but was doubt- 
ful about the physical order ; Stirner is sure of the ob- 
jective order, but cannot be so easily convinced of the 
self. Yet Stirner is the better individualist of the two; 
in comparison with him, Descartes is almost nothing. 
In its most essential form, self -truth consists in the 
right to affirm the self as such; where the joy of life 
permits the individualistic " I think," and the worth of 
life the " I will," the truth of life allows the individ- 
ualistic " I am." This principle of individualism is not 
one with the primitive cogito, ergo sum of Descartes; 
indeed, the truth of individualism is better expressed by 
the judgment in its converted form: I am; therefore I 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 165 

think. The self has its states ; it puts forth its volitions ; 
it is its self. 

(1) The Passion for Predication 

In the consideration of truth, one is disposed to feel 
that the question at hand is exceptional, so that the 
determination of joy by the senses and value by the 
will does not justify the free deduction of truth by the 
ego as such. This feeling of reverence toward the true, 
this shudder in its presence, is wholesome indeed and 
not illogical ; but it is beset by a peculiar danger for the 
individualist. While the individualist is spending his 
precious time adoring truth in the abstract, some less 
devout person takes possesson of the sources of knowl- 
edge whence the ego is forced to draw water, not from 
the springs, but from the wells of truth as these have 
been dug by certain investigators. In looking at truth 
in its superb limitlessness, the individual fails to observe 
that some special form of human culture has been erect- 
ing a truth-wall well inside the horizon of knowledge. 
In this manner, the vast life-truth has been enclosed 
within the wall of the ancient State or the mediaeval 
Church, modern Reason or modern Science. The result 
has been to endow, if not to fetter, truth by the appli- 
cation of limiting adjectives, so that truth has at times 
been, not truth eo ipso, but classic truth which to Aris- 
totle seemed final, scholastic truth which brought the 
mind of Aquinas to the omega of truth's alphabet, 
rationalistic truth which had the last word for Voltaire, 
scientific truth with which Comte and Spencer sought 
to end all speculation in the world. All except the last 
of these adjectives has worn off in the wear and tear 
of life, so that one cannot help believing that the fate 
of the adjective " scientific " will be parallel to that of 
the other qualifying predicates. In the midst of these 
fluctuating truths, one factor seemed constant; it was 



166 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the "I think" of individualism. From the adjectival 
point of view, Aristotle differed from Voltaire, Aquinas 
from Spencer; yet, in all four types of thinking, the 
presence of the thinking self was invariable. 

When individualism struggles for the truth of life, 
it struggles against the truth of life as this is formu- 
lated in a special manner, and the special truth-mode 
which individualism opposes to-day is the scientific one. 
Ancient truth had its opponents as one sees in the his- 
tory of the Stoics; Mediaeval truth was fought by nom- 
inalism; the truth of the Enlightenment was negated by 
Hume; and may not the truth of scientism be opposed 
by individualism? It has ever been the exterior gen- 
eralization which has come in for its share of the con- 
flict; and, in the resistance to the scientific synthesis, 
this conflict is now going on in the field of individual- 
ism. Far from being truth as such, classic and scholas- 
tic, rationalistic and scientific truth has been a mixture 
of principles, opinions, and terms. Terms, or words, 
which would seem to be the least formidable, are often 
the greatest foes of progress toward a higher synthesis; 
next come opinions, which are furthered by authority; 
last of all, principles, which, while the most difficult to 
withstand, are often the first to give ground. Individ- 
ualism, however, is most anxious to offset the influence 
of words and opinions whose domination is little sus- 
pected until one conjures with a term like " theology," 
" reason," " science." How can these august expres- 
sions signify anything but august truth itself? If the 
ultimate cannot be found without upon the horizon, may 
it be found within in the " I am " of the thinker ? 

The actual pursuit of truth has always been conducted 
under the auspices of a peculiarly human passion, the 
passion for predication. Given a subject, like some 
physical fact or psychic phenomenon, and the human 
mind will not rest until it has set up some sort of con- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 167 

nection between these and some other fact or phenom- 
enon. This is very largely as it should be, and one can 
hardly provide for the progress of knowledge apart from 
the persistent predication of the restless, imaginative 
intellect. Physical phenomena shall be connected with 
psychical ones : such was the dictum of the primitive 
mind. Psychical phenomena shall be explained in the 
light of physical predicates : that is the dictum of the 
contemporary mind. Where both popular and sober 
thinking has always exercised with freedom the right 
of predication, definite periods have exhibited their 
favorite types of predication. The classic mind sought 
to explain all details of physical and social existence by 
direct reference to the type; hence the Ideas of Plato 
and the syllogisms of Aristotle. The scholastic mind, 
not oblivious of ancient logic, sought in the doctrines of 
the Church the predicates of physical reality, even when 
physical reality might well have disdained such an august 
explanation. The Enlightenment thrust upon all things 
the single predicate of reason; it might be nature with 
its seismic disturbances so irrational, it might be man's 
religion with its interesting fantasies, yet all must be 
rational before it could be true. Our own age is no less 
free from this mania for the predicate ; only now we 
seem to prefer the observed rather than the idealized, 
the believed, or the rationalized. Every judgment of 
truth, therefore, must have a scientific predicate, other- 
wise it is not truth at all. Predication, we may say, is 
just and necessary, but special predication may lead to 
error. Suppose that nature and humanity refuse to 
come into the cage of the ideal, the credible, the rational, 
the scientific; what can be done with the creature in 
whose sight the net is spread in vain? 

When relentless predication applies itself to the human 
ego, the result is unsatisfactory for both the logical and 
the personal factors involved in the transaction. The 



1 68 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ancients predicated in such a manner as to leave out of 
consideration the human self. Socrates was intolerant 
toward the egoism of Protagoras, so that Greek thought 
established an ideal system from which there was no 
escape except by means of the nihilistic apathy of the 
Stoic who, unwilling to abide by the generalization, 
simply withdrew to the shadows of such inner selfhood 
as he could find. Scholastic vigor of predication soon 
reduced the world of things and persons to order, but 
the individual was called upon to renounce all that was 
most peculiar to him in order that the conceptual circle 
might be perfect. Was the Enlightenment more human ; 
did it allot to each individual his own world? The 
Enlightenment effaced egoism as effectually as the clas- 
sic and scholastic systems had done. Our contemporary 
science has been no more liberal; its concepts have been 
as drastic as ancient ideals, as grim as mediaeval walls. 
Truth has been allowed all things except the self, and 
it is the self which is conspicuous for its enjoyment and 
appreciation of the true. Molecules, atoms, and cells 
do not suffer when they are not recognized; individuals 
languish when they are not allowed the sunlight of 
truth. Can it be wondered at, then, that the ego has 
sought self-deliverance by means of nominalism, irration- 
alism, irreligion; and can it be doubted that these forms 
of negation had at heart the interests of a superior form 
of affirmation? 

The conceptualizing method of authoritarian thinking 
has its advantages in that it makes it possible for the 
thinker to view the whole world without the arduous, 
dangerous journey from place to place; conceptualism 
simplifies mental travel by drawing imaginary circles of 
latitude and longitude. But the method of conceptual 
reasoning is in itself suspicious, because such reasoning 
is forced to omit details, and these details, when peculiar 
to man, may be of special, immutable interest. Con- 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 169 

ceptualism is forced to emphasize the abstract, the gen- 
eral; when that which is true for all is true for none. 
Nor is anything gained when induction takes the place 
of deduction. It is true that induction seems to make 
overtures to the individual; but this is all in the seem- 
ing, since the manifest aim of induction is to arrange 
the individual things in line where deductive reasoning 
placed them within a circle. Enclosed or aligned, the 
fate of the human self is the same; selfhood is lost by 
one method as readily as by the other. Where other 
concepts, wrought out by either deduction or induction, 
may not complain, the elaboration of the concept " Man " 
has the misfortune to omit the most human of charac- 
teristics, selfhood. 

Furthermore, all attempts at conceptualizing and 
predicating are necessarily beset with a misleading 
optimism. How does the thinker know that the facta 
bruta will submit to his amiable generalization? Is an 
intellectual rule within, a real law without? At the 
beginning of thought in the western world, even when 
it was then that thought was most optimistic, the pres- 
ence of possible pessimism was never lost to view or 
left out of the calculation. The brighter the light of 
the intellect, the deeper the shadow of irrationality. 
Through strength and skill, the Greeks wrought an 
idealism by rescuing reason from the domination of 
unreason. It was, as Neitzsche's The Birth of Tragedy 
pointed out, the living conflict between the chaotic and 
contradictory of the Dionysian and the form-loving 
Appollonian. Greek poetry and Greek philosophy joined 
arms in subduing the barbaric in Greek life. Where 
classicism had its Dionysius, scholasticism had its Devil, 
with his power to pervert the mind. If, therefore, these 
ages insisted upon the " truth " as they saw it, the reason 
for such insistence may be found in the feeling that 
what has been wrought in the face of such diabolical 



I jo THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

unreason should not be surrendered, should not perhaps 
be questioned. Alas ! for modern scientism, which is 
so strangely wanting in helpful diabolism, so wanting in 
the " friendly foe " of stubborn unreason. Yet, is the 
spirit of unreason any less real to-day than it was in 
the days of Plato and Aquinas? Science now dreams 
its dream of pure truth, but its optimism may be its 
undoing. If Dionysius and the Devil are gone, un- 
reason still remains, and it has been the duty of indi- 
vidualism to play its disconcerting part in the program; 
for its has been individualism which has resisted the 
scientific generalization, individualism in the form of 
a Satanism peculiar to Milton and Blake, Emerson and 
Stirner, the Decadents and Symbolists. Will individ- 
ualistic pessimism succeed in awakening science from 
its dogmatic slumber? 

(2) Humanistic Criteria of Truth 

The individualistic claim that the relation of the self 
to truth is exceptional is based quite largely upon the 
thought that the criteria of truth are largely of an indi- 
vidualistic character. Truth itself may be more than 
the standards by which man judges truth; moreover, 
the question of truth may involve certain grand criteria 
which have no special concern with the " I am " of 
individualism. Thus, when knowledge avows that truth 
means the correspondence of thought with thing, or the 
coherence of thought with thought, the ego can hardly 
be regarded as anything more than the point where 
correspondence and coherence bring their two factors 
together. Yet, the thought that it is the ego which has 
the capacity to unite thought and thing, thought and 
thought, should encourage the individualist to insist 
upon the importance of the individual in the whole 
truth-problem. Over and above these major standards 
of truth, there are certain criteria which have ever 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 171 

served to corroborate the truth or falsity of this or that 
idea. These criteria are of a personal character; they 
have to do with the humanistic fact that truth, instead 
of being merely " true," is possessed of concomitant 
characteristics which involve the individual's sense of 
joy, of worth, of worship. For this reason, truth is 
far from being a formal affair whose validity depends 
altogether upon demonstration ; truth is possessed of a 
reality whereby the individual as individual is able to 
gather, not only verity, but joy, worth, and adoration. 
Could truth be truth and yet leave the mind unsatisfied 
in its desires? Can truth end in a quod erat demon- 
strandum and not communicate something calculated to 
please the senses, add worth to the will, or command 
the devotion of the mind? Real, living truth has ever 
been supposed to supply just such humanistic demands. 
Far from appearing stark and cold, truth comes 
warm and clothed; its most apparent characteristic is 
the eudaemonistic one in virtue of which truth affords 
the heart joy. The arguments which are forthcoming 
to establish the intimate relationship between truth and 
joy may be found, first of all, in the inversion of an 
ethical judgment to the effect that the highest joy is 
found in the possession of truth. In the assertion of 
this sense of satisfaction which comes from beholding 
the true, Aristotle has been the most insistent; yet other 
forms of philosophy have gone to declare that the per- 
ception of truth saves the soul, gives consolation to the 
mind, or satisfies the desires of the human heart. Man 
cannot be happy without the consciousness of truth, so 
that it becomes possible to say, happiness is truth. Now, 
to convert this proposition mutatis mutandis is to assert 
that where there is genuine joy there is also truth, for 
truth cannot conduct us to happiness unless happiness 
be allowed to reciprocate and lead us back to truth. 
In joy, therefore, appears one of the criteria of the true. 



172 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



To construct what might thus be called a eudaemon- 
istic epistemology upon the basis of this thought is far 
from the intent of individualism, especially as individ- 
ualism realizes how prone to illusion is the yearning 
heart of mankind. Nevertheless, individualism, in its 
desire to find the truth of life as well as the truth of 
things, is not ready to consent to a formalistic system 
which constructs truth out of purely impersonal ele- 
ments when truth itself seems to constitute such a life- 
interest for man. It is as a criterion of truth rather 
than truth itself which individualism seeks in the sense 
of joy, whence individualism asserts that truth is known 
to the mind, not simply because truth seems clear, but 
because it has the capacity to yield a sense of joy. 
Where that joy of intellect is felt, the truth of mind 
is all but proved. Not only the Upanishads, to which 
reference was made in speaking of The Inward Enjoy- 
ment of Life, have seen fit to refer to the convincing 
connection between enjoying and knowing, but the Gos- 
pels and Epistles as well have looked upon truth as a 
palimpsest on which, as upon parchment, the original 
message of truth was written over an additional com- 
munication relative to the humanistic sense in which 
that truth made its appeal. The truth of the Gospel 
was very largely made up of its ability to communicate 
joy; thus did the Gospel become a veritable evangelium. 
St. John speaks more dialectically when he declares, 
We know because we love; it was thus the agape which 
made up the ratio cognoscendi of the disciples' faith. 
Where humanistic pragmatism has sought to adopt such 
a eudaemonistic epistemology, it has prejudiced its cause 
by failing to observe that happiness is only a criterion 
of truth, while this happiness instead of being the fan- 
tastic feeling of that which " makes a difference to 
some one," is looked upon critically and disinterestedly 
as the normal appetite of the human soul at large. An 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 173 

unrestricted eudaemonism in knowledge can never free 
itself from the danger of illusion. 

Critical individualism is none the less convinced that 
where truth imparts joy, truth is none the less an affair 
of value. Those who, like Ritschl, have laid so much 
emphasis upon the value- judgment, have been guilty of 
regarding the sense of worth as though it were some- 
thing extraordinary; moreover, these apostles of the 
Werturtheil have never been able to overcome the 
Kantian prejudice to the effect that the moral principle 
of value comes at the death of the mental principle of 
knowledge as thought. Individualism has shown a dis- 
position to look upon worth as the natural accompani- 
ment of truth, rather than its rival. Thus it is not 
because the idea lacked truth that it was endowed with 
worth; it is endowed with worth because it has truth. 
When viewed as a criterion of truth, value has the 
effect of showing how ideas, instead of reposing in the 
calm intellect, take up their work in the active world 
of will, where they " work " because they are true, not 
that they are true because they work. False ideas often 
work and that in a manner quite perennial, as is the 
case with the divine right of kings, the infallibility of 
popes, and the natural right of mankind. Pragmatism, 
which has grown like Jonah's gourd, has not taken care 
to watch the worm destined to destroy that which has 
grown up so wantonly. 

The danger incident upon connecting truth with the 
idea of worth appears in the tendency toward negation, 
the negation of ideals when these do not seem to serve 
the valuational interests of the human will. The spirit 
of negation, der Geist der stets verneint, is one with 
which individualism is all too familiar; yet, individual- 
ism has worked consciously toward the negation of the 
alleged ideals of rationalism, as one can see from a 
reading of individualists from Blake to Neitzsche. In 



I 7 4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

its work of negation, individualism differs from prag- 
matism which merely falls short of the idea which indi- 
vidualism surmounts : instead of lagging behind, indi- 
vidualism forges ahead undismayed by the prospect of 
destroying that which is dear to itself. The motive for 
such destruction appears in the idea that the old gen- 
eralization will not suffice for the truth of life; and, 
without any prospect of supplying a higher synthesis, 
the individual shows himself ready to resort to irration- 
alism, provided that that seems better fitted to conserve 
the ideal of life's worth. The connection between 
knowledge and value is akin to the bond between virtue 
and value; where a contrite ethics refuses to lower 
virtue to the realm of mere utility, it is none the less 
persuaded that the essence of morality cannot be con- 
served in an analytical judgment which insists that 
virtue is virtue ; such a constructive ethics thus advances 
to the idea that virtue has worth. In the same manner, 
individualism insists that truth is not merely truth but 
worth also, so that the validity of ideas, established in 
their own intellectualistic way, may be corroborated by 
showing that these ideas have a value. 

Truth, which is joyful and valuable, is none the less 
worshipful ; individualism, with its unhappy tendency 
toward the irrationalistic negation of knowledge, never 
loses sight of the fact that by its very nature truth is 
divine. Thus, instead of exhausting itself in satisfying 
the logical function of judgment in the human under- 
standing, truth is possessed of such wealth and versa- 
tility as to be able to satisfy the sense of enjoyment and 
the feeling of disinterested appreciation, while it further 
extends its sway by commanding the full assent of the 
worshipful heart as a whole. In the career of individ- 
ualism, where many a fine paradox and ardent contra- 
diction has had its place, truth has never been lowered 
to a level below that occupied by the ego itself. Usually 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 175 

exalted above the ego as his heaven, sometimes made 
parallel with the ego itself, truth has never been regarded 
as a mere means, an instrument. In worshipfulness, 
then, appears the third criterion of truthfulness; let the 
supreme idea be the world or Godhead, reason or human- 
ity, the exponent of the idea has ever been its devotee. 
Just how scientism is to supply the mind with these 
criteria is another thing, for scientism makes no room 
for aesthetic joyfulness or moral worth; still less does 
scientism provide the mind with an idea capable of 
commanding the adoration of the soul. Scientism is 
thus wanting in all forms of and all tendencies toward 
a culture under the auspices of which the complete 
human intellect may realize itself as that which is akin 
to the truth which it adores. 

Individualism from Protagoras to Ibsen has never 
failed to seek that truth which should have the power 
to contain man, the ability to content his spirit. Where 
individualism has assumed a militant form, its polemic 
has been directed against the merely theoretical repre- 
sentation of the truth rather than against truth itself. 
At heart, individualism has been possessed of that or- 
ganic conception of truth-culture peculiar to the Grecian 
and Germanic mind; the dilettante spirit, which fails to 
establish the bond between thought and life, has been 
foreign to individualism, which has sought to establish 
truth, not merely for the sake of things and ideas, but 
for its own sake, since it is by means of truth that the 
human ego is able to affirm itself as real in the world. 

2. The; Affirmation of the; Sexf 

It is by means of truth that the individual is able to 
affirm his own inner being ; the supreme text upon which 
all fundamental egoism is based is found in the words, 
"I am the truth " ; in a manner most strident, Stirner, 
who suffered from the slavery of Hegelianism, pro- 



176 THE GROUND AND GOAL. OF HUMAN LIFE 

ceeded to say, " I raise myself above truths and their 
power; as I am supersensual, so I am supertrue." 49 
The spirit of individualism reposes somewhere between 
the divine utterance and the diabolical assertion; at any 
rate, there can be no genuine individualism when truth 
is allowed to invest the things of the world and the 
members of society in general, as is the happy fate of 
things and persons under the auspices of scientism, 
without at the same time and in a more intimate manner 
investing the human ego as a self-conscious and self- 
willed " I am." Is the self sub-true ; is it to occupy a 
logical position where truth arches far above its head 
without allowing the ego to participate in its essence? 
Stirner goes too far where scientism does not go far 
enough; the balance is found in a conception of selfhood 
which unifies the self and the true. In the synthesis of 
the self and the true, the very essence of all spiritual 
religion may be found. It is peculiar to the genius of 
religion to arouse the soul to a sense of individual exist- 
ence and to inspire it with the desire to affirm its intrin- 
sic character in the world. Where scientism surveys 
man under the form of nature, religion regards him as 
a detached creature whose aim is alien to his genesis; 
roaming at large as he does, man enjoys an implicit 
freedom, while he further shows himself to be in a way 
superfluous. Nature does not need him as it needs the 
beast, and if he is to live his life as human, it must be 
in an exceptional manner. Of all earth's creatures, 
man is the only one able to say, " I am." 

In order to gather the individualistic fruits of religion, 
one must observe that, contrary to the traditional idea, 
religion has its source in the attempt on the part of the 
soul to affirm itself in opposition to the world. The 
theological idea of religion is formal, secondary; when 
it insists that religion has to do with the speculative 

49 The Ego and His Own, tr. Byington, 463. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 177 

affirmation of Godhead, it fails to advise us why man 
undertakes such an extraordinary program. The hu- 
manistic view of religion is inaugurated by the activistic 
tendency to quit the world and go forth in search of 
something more complete and satisfying. Where the 
theological conception proceeds to mark God plus, the 
humanistic tendency is to mark the world minus. In 
all this, it may seem that the individualistic attitude is 
too nihilistic to be true and valuable, but the fact remains 
that human faith has asserted itself by means of nega- 
tion, but not in such a manner as to render impossible 
the postulating of a theistic ideal. World-negation, 
then, seems to afford us the most original principle of 
religion, while it is further possible to assert that, with 
this nihilistic motive at work, religion has sometimes 
found it unnecessary to advance to the theistic postulate. 
In Taoism, the world is set at nought in both thought 
and deed, but the divine is neglected; in Buddhism, the 
negation of the world is more intense, the neglect of 
Deity more pronounced. Here it must be observed that, 
with the failure to evince the idea of Godhead, these 
religions are equally lax in asserting the existence of 
selfhood, content as they are to rid the mind of the idea 
of the world. Only the preliminary step is taken; the 
principles of selfhood and Godhead thus fail to receive 
adequate expression. 

In spite of this lapse on the part of such religions as 
Taoism and Buddhism, it cannot be denied that a world- 
religion, instead of theologizing, takes up its work in a 
humanistic fashion, even when the negation of the world, 
instead of serving simply as a means of asserting the 
self, brings the religious operation to a conclusion. Man 
feels that the world is against him, so that only by a 
vigorous withdrawal from its solid walls may he be 
himself indeed. Humanity in its internal character is 
the postulate which, at the beginning, religion has at 



178 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

heart. When the independent existence and character- 
istic life of the self are established, it becomes possible 
for the religionist to add the postulates of worldhood 
and Godhead, but the prior claim is advanced by the 
self for the self. Religion, like art and morality, is 
based upon the inner independence of the human self; 
its lesson is the " I am." In our own age, when the 
religionist, unaware of the possibilities of selfhood as 
a vehicle of spiritual life, has given pathetic demon- 
stration of the vanity with which any form of inner 
life may seek to advance its intrinsic claims by an appeal 
to exteriority, contemporary religion is now busy ex- 
hausting itself in the smug endeavor to be " scientific " 
and " social," as if, by aping the age, it could come to 
its own so far afield from its proper place in the world. 
As a result, irreligion, with its antipathy to science and 
society, is giving a more consistent, though less happy, 
demonstration of the self and its independence. Religion 
sprang from the human self and has ever had the affairs 
of self in its keeping. When intellectual activities were 
in their incipiency, as in the days of Vedanta and Chris- 
tianity, it was not difficult for the religionist to isolate 
the soul and place it in its proper position, but with the 
development of scientific philosophy, the task of self- 
assertion is far more difficult. But does it follow that 
the religious principle of the " I exist " is any less con- 
vincing ? 

The world has grown beyond man and that to such 
a degree that man feels divorced from existence; no 
longer can he find his place or determine his fate. 
Worse still, man is so situated that, insecure as he is 
in the world without, he is no longer sure of his position 
within himself. The mystical Vedantist rejoiced in self- 
hood to such a degree that he felt justified in identifying 
the world with the self; the modern religionist on the 
contrary is in such straits that he can hardly identify 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 179 

the inner life with the self. No longer is it that which 
goes on without, no longer does he feel that he is that 
which goes on within. For this reason, the problem of 
religion, when this is adequately conceived, consists in 
re-establishing the relation between the inner life which 
has been so vigorously introspected by psychology, with 
the ego as the sovereign of consciousness. In this en- 
deavor, no help may be expected from scientific psy- 
chology, which is pledged to the nervous system rather 
than to the ego ; help must come from the ego itself, 
from the ego with its various forms of culture. In the 
career of religious thought, it has been the fate of the 
devotee to entertain a conception of self -truth which the 
self in its temporal capacity was unable to absorb; so 
that, the moment the individual flowered in the form of 
the Self, it promptly withered in the strong sunlight. 
In forms at once intellectualistic and voluntaristic, the 
human self has had the opportunity to identify itself 
with truth, only to repudiate selfhood the moment that 
selfhood became perfect. Vedanta came to the place 
where it could say of reality, " It is the true, it is the 
self, and thou art it " ; 50 Schopenhauerianism arrived 
at the point where the individuated will was one with 
the whole will-to-live : 51 then, both oriental intellectual- 
ism and occidental voluntarism indulged in a destructive 
pessimism in the shades of which the individual ego was 
obscured in the impersonal, nameless All. So vast, so 
august is the true that it cannot safely be relegated to 
the mere individual. 

At heart religious, individualism cannot endure this 
fatal generalization, so that where the truth of spirit 
may be expressed in religion, as the truth of matter is 
expressed in scientism, the truth of life has often turned 
for salvation to irreligion. To interpret such irreligion 
as a movement devoted to the establishment of life-truth 

50 Khandogya Upanishad, VI, 8, 7. B1 Welt als Wille u. Tors., § 63. 
12 



180 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is by no means easy, although the advanced individualist 
cannot help feeling that his egoism is somehow preserved 
in the midst of all the contradictions of the irreligionists. 
Religion itself is often irreligion at its inception; the 
affirmation of the new implies the negation of the old. 
Thus it was with Moses and his cult of Jahvism, although 
in this instance the new religion was contrasted with an 
old one in the form of a conflict between inimical races. 
In the instance of Buddhism, progress toward a more 
complete and more personal view of life was brought 
about by an atheistic movement whence Buddhism was 
distinguished from the authorized Brahminism. Nothing 
less can be said of primitive Christianity, which arose in 
the moment of a negation which spared not the Hebrew 
law nor the Hellenic world. When the truth of life was 
viewed from the standpoint of the old order, the new 
life-truth was destined to advance its ideals by means 
of an insurrectional movement whose tenets were only 
one remove from atheism and anarchy. The motive for 
such quasi-irreligion is an individualistic one; it is the 
idea of saving life-truth from cramping formulations of 
that truth. 

The same attempt to arrive at truth as the super-true 
is to be observed in connection with philosophy of relig- 
ion, in which the dialectical meaning of religion ex- 
hibits itself. Modern religious thought, whose history 
has been a trying one, had the fate to initiate its career 
in the form of a polemical philosophy of rights. Where 
rights led to revolution in one quarter, they inclined 
toward religion in another. In Deism, one observes how 
religion may assume the form of irreligion, and while 
the deistic movement was usually petty in its polemics, 
the larger history of the movement does not fail to show 
how the religious spirit may make use of the principle 
of rights with the aim of revealing the method by which 
the soul asserts itself. Rationalistic in method, Deism 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 181 

sprang from a juristic motive, so that, in the Enlighten- 
ment, rights and religion went hand in hand. Estab- 
lished upon an atheistic basis by Grotius, the philosophy 
of rights was not long in asserting a principle of free- 
dom according to which the individual had ni dieu ni 
mditre. Spinoza and Locke both stepped aside from 
the natural course of their respective philosophies fof 
the purpose of asserting the freedom of human faith, 
which they did in complete accord with the principle 
of rights. From the opposed poles of rationalism and 
empiricism, Spinoza and Locke came together for the 
purpose of asserting the right of the individual to exer- 
cise free religion ; the result was all but irreligion. If 
it was rights for Spinoza; it was aesthetics for Schleier- 
macher. Upon the authority of aesthetics, Schleier- 
macher declared religion free from metaphysics and 
morality, a conclusion which had the effect of develop- 
ing a philosophy of religion but one remove from a 
philosophy of irreligion. Where essential argument is 
involved, there is no difference between the romantic 
religion of Schleiermacher and the decadent irreligion 
of Baudelaire. Where primitive Christianity had repu- 
diated things Hellenic and laws Judaic, Schleiermacher 
and Baudelaire found it possible to set aside the meta- 
physics of things and the morality of laws. In all forms 
of religious irreligion, it is the assertion of the self 
which is paramount. 

When the religious assertion of the self passes over 
into irreligion, the motive for the unhappy transition is 
found in the desire to conserve the truth of life in the 
form of an " I am." Both religion and irreligion are 
ideal; both reject the world of scientism. Irreligion 
strives to transcend religion for no other reason than 
that religion fails to assert the independence of the 
human self. That for which irreligion contends is the 
ideal which religion itself has not the courage to ad- 



182 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

vance, the independence of the inner life. Like Sieg- 
fried, the enemy of the gods, irreligion fights for that 
ideal which Wotan, the religious one, had not the 
strength of will to affirm. Baudelaire and Huysmans, 
to say nothing of Milton and Blake, uphold the cause 
of Satan, because they deem it impossible to find truth 
in the traditional idea of God. Had religion been faith- 
ful to its original impulse to affirm the self within man, 
there had been no need of pessimistic irreligion; had 
Schleiermacher been heard, there had been no ear for 
the voice of Baudelaire. Unfortunately, religion suc- 
cumbed to a " scientific " conception of man, according 
to which the inner individual is nothing, whereupon 
irreligion came forward to guard the individual against 
the anthropological notion of human existence. One 
may join Comte and thus pass from religion to philo- 
sophy and from philosophy to science, or he may take 
Feuerbach as his guide and proceed from God to reason, 
from reason to man. But the positivistic conception of 
man is no better than the rationalistic conception of 
reason or the scholastic idea of God. The idea, " Man," 
is no more real than the earlier ideas of God and 
Reason; the anthropological ideal of scientism is an 
abstraction far removed from the living man of indi- 
vidualism. Man seems destined ever to make himself 
the measure of all things, for which reason it becomes 
urgent to discover what is essential to man, in order 
that the metron may be just and sufficient. Under the 
auspices of anthropomorphism, man was regarded as 
individual and valuational; with anthropologism, the 
social and utilitarian prevails. Where theology suffered 
the man spiritual to regard the world as though it sup- 
plied a place for the display of human values, biology 
has looked to the world to explain the origin of life and 
the immediate utilities which are involved in animal 
existence. What has been gained by this transfer from 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 183 

theology to biology? The socialized conception of man 
may be as oppressive as was the religious view of human- 
ity; naturalism may be as intolerable as scholasticism. 
In order to escape from the narrowness of such scien- 
tizing naturalism, it has been necessary for the irrelig- 
ious individualist to break through the limited circle of 
existence which has been cast about mankind. 

The service of irreligion consists in its transgression, 
in its tendency to break through the limiting circle. In 
a certain suggestive manner, it may be pointed out that 
the philosophy of irreligion is almost identical with 
nominalism ; but, where nominalism consists in the 
assertion of the particular as particular, irreligion asserts 
the particular as individualistic and personal. It was 
by means of individualistic nominalism that the Sophist 
delivered man from the toils of the purely physical 
philosophy which had obtained among the Greeks, just 
as it was through the same destructive dialectic that 
late scholastic thought freed itself from the domination 
of ecclesiasticism. When modern thought felt itself 
emancipated from the realism incident upon the idea 
of God, it proceeded to circumscribe itself with the 
realism of reason; in this manner, "natural religion" 
became as oppressive to the individual as supernatural 
religion had been. To cast off the yoke of reason was 
only to assume another oppression in the form of society, 
as this conception was perfected by the socializing pos- 
itivists, so that it is in opposition to the realism of 
" Society " that egoistic irreligion is now contending. 
The irreligionist is thus the anti-social thinker, the 
speculative anarchist of the day. 

The ease and submissiveness with which " advanced " 
scientific thought has bent beneath this new yoke is sur- 
prising; both bows of the clumsy instrument are now 
operative; here, the intellect is so fettered that no senti- 
ment may be approved unless it show itself to be social ; 



1 84 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

there, the will submits to a philosophy which furthers 
no impulse unless it be useful and productive. Within 
the mind, the circle of scientism is so tightly drawn that 
the stream of consciousness must pass through canals; 
all conscious states must be standardized. Without, the 
free-born impulses must run on tracks, whereas their nat- 
ural tendency is to move spontaneously with noble irre- 
sponsibility. Against the inward domination of the in- 
tellect, aestheticism has been a sturdy protest, while the 
exterior lordship of the social regime has been as stoutly 
opposed by immoralism. Irreligion now comes in to 
sanction these assertions of " I think " and " I will," 
while irreligion itself consists of a unified " I am." 
Where aestheticism indulged in the morbid, immoralism 
in the vicious, irreligion makes use of the nihilistic, the 
repudiation of everything external. 

In the character of nominalism, irreligion tends to 
postulate the notion that free individualism cannot be 
conceived of as having boundaries. Irreligion thus lays 
all emphasis upon the centrifugal impulse, none upon 
the centripetal. Yet, at heart, that which irreligion has 
been asserting consists in no more than a proposition to 
the effect that the alleged boundary is not genuine, that 
the circumscribing line is not properly drawn. The 
intellectual life of humanity seems to consist of a per- 
petual drawing and erasing of limiting circles, with cer- 
tain moments of rest between the movements which now 
enclose and then release the human spirit. Irreligion 
is lodged in the will, whence proceeds without cessation 
the living, striving self-affirmation of the soul; estab- 
lished religion is of the intellect with its constant tend- 
ency to set limits in the form of premises and postulates. 
Which shall rule, which be final in authority? 

While philosophy may not be able to solve the anti- 
nomy of will and intellect, it may assure itself that each 
stands in need of the other. Certainly the intellect with 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 185 

its circle-drawing tendency stands in need of the ever- 
radiating impulse which lives in the creative will ; other- 
wise there were nothing to circumscribe. On the other 
hand, the will with its irreligion does not fail to need 
the limiting intellect, if for no other purpose than to 
supply the will with an object of resistance. But, in a 
more perfect manner, the intellect directs the will; and 
it is guidance rather than limitation which the intellect 
should offer the will. Irreligion, in its constant repu- 
diation of intellectual limitation, thus assumes the form 
of irrationalism, whereby confusion enters in to make 
new ideas and new impulses possible. Far from being 
purely privative, irrationalism consists of a living force 
to which the various forms of life and culture are in- 
debted. The special service rendered by individualistic 
irrationalism reveals itself in the egoistic repudiation of 
the scientific and social of contemporary thought; that 
scientism and sociality now have the upper hand cannot 
be denied, but that their reign is no period of peace is 
equally undeniable. Where theory, as expressed scien- 
tifically and socially cries, Peace ! peace ! irrationalism 
tells us that there is no peace. The victory of sci- 
entism over nature, the swift subjugation of humanity 
at the hands of sociality, cannot hide from our eyes 
the fact that irrationalistic pessimism is a conflagration 
scarcely under control, so that the future of life and 
thought is not likely to witness a continuance of the 
optimistic regime peculiar to scientifico-social positivism. 
Neither the scientific nor the social has been capable 
of willing anything that might be called irreligion; in- 
deed, it might even be suggested that, in the manifest 
desire of the scientific thinker to reduce both things 
and men to a system of orderly relations, the religious 
ideals of peace and good-will were availing themselves 
of novel modes of expression. Every form of advanced 
spiritual religion takes upon itself the task of subduing 



186 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the stubbornness of facts, whether they be natural or 
social; and it is this spirit of subduing which so often 
shows itself in the scientific desire to reduce all phe- 
nomena to laws. The spirit of irreligion appears in the 
relentless attempt to break into all generalizations in 
order that chaos and irrationality, as these linger in the 
will, may be saved from the fatal generalization. Taken 
by itself as an irrationalistic and pessimistic view of life 
and the world, irreligion cannot hope to be more than a 
critical, destructive movement in the progress of which 
that which is superficial may either be destroyed or may 
give way to a superior synthesis in human life. Indi- 
vidualism has embraced irreligion because irreligion is 
anxious to apply the acid test to a form of spiritual life 
whose baseness is suspected; hence, the severe views of 
such individualists as Blake and Baudelaire, Emerson 
and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Wagner. Everywhere irre- 
ligion reveals its longing, not merely to break down the 
established thought-order, but to subject life to that 
expansion and renovation which shall make possible a 
higher synthesis. 

3. The; Claims op Irrexigion 

Where the struggle for the joy of life demanded 
aestheticism for the liberation of its soul-states, and the 
struggle for the worth of life involved immoralism as 
the means for the establishment of the free initiative, 
the struggle for the truth of life is forced to call in 
irreligion in order to support the affirmation of the self 
as an " I am." Whether Deism or diabolism, whether 
rationalism or irrationalism, irreligion has always been 
inspired by the hope of emancipating the self from all 
oppressive forms of exteriority. In neither case does 
one find a free, unprejudiced treatment of religion as 
such; rather is it a polemical movement directed against 
authority visible or invisible. Such was the case with 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 187 

Spinoza, with Blake, with Baudelaire; each of these 
thinkers sought to place before his mind an idea which, 
instead of being relegated to some impersonal realm, 
should make its direct appeal to the worshipful soul. 
Irreligion thus became a kind of worship. Like aes- 
theticism and immoralism, irreligion was coincident with 
individualism: Is life internal; is it free; is it true? 
The answer to this triple question came in the form of 
individualism. The individualist as irrationalist and 
irreligionist, forced to seek the truth of life fuori le 
mura, felt impelled to urge his thought to the extremes 
of Satanism and diabolism, even when his logic was at 
heart little more than that of nominalism. The ideal, 
no longer to be found in the exterior order, was sought 
within; and, when the ideal failed to clothe itself in 
noble forms, it was given over to the anarchism of 
Stirner, the " spleen " of Baudelaire. Yet, in the midst 
of these spiritual excesses, the longing for a truth which 
should become the soul was not lacking. 

The particular method pursued by the irrationalist, 
far from consisting in the assertion of groundless ideas, 
had to do with the complete transmutation of accepted 
notions : predicate took the place of subject, species that 
of genus, while the false assumed the prerogative of the 
true. The individualist was possessed of the idea that 
the progress of history had had the effect of turning 
things upside down, whence the effort of the irrationalist 
to revert them to their true position. When one observes 
the unhappy and unworthy position of reason and self- 
hood in contemporary science, one can hardly believe 
that the irrationalists were wholly wrong. Strindberg 
expresses this figuratively when, in The Dream Play, 
certain of his characters say, " Do you know what I 
see in this mirror? The world turned the right way! 
Yes indeed, for naturally we see it upside down. How 
did it come to be turned the wrong way? When the 



i88 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

copy was taken — You have said it ! The copy — I 
have always had the feeling that it was a spoiled copy. 
And when I began to recall the original images, I grew 
dissatisfied with everything. But men call it sorehead- 
edness, looking at the world through the Devil's eyes, 
and other such things." 52 With such a posterior prius, 
or the world inverted, before him, Strindberg can sug- 
gest little or nothing to improve the situation. In such 
pessimism, he is on a plane with Ibsen and Thomas 
Hardy; yet, with such minds, there is not a complete 
sense of helplessness, still less lack of courage. The 
irrationalists are willing to consider things as they are, 
even when the face of reality appears grotesque and 
distorted, even when the truth of life seems to repose 
in the malign visage of irreligion, in its transmutation 
of true and false. 

First in order among the methods of irrationalism 
appears that of mysticism, a genial way of asserting 
the soul, a method according to which the sharp con- 
trast between the interior self and the exterior orders 
o£ nature and humanity was avoided. The mysticism 
of Schleiermacher's Religions philosophie served to mask 
the irrationalistic severity of his dialectic; yet, in 
Schleiermacher's repudiation of the metaphysical and 
the moralistic, as found in the second of his Discourses 
on Religion, the essence of the irreligious is to be found. 
Passing so easily from the old rationalistic synthesis of 
things in the world and individuals in humanity to the 
new romantic synthesis of the same things and persons 
in a superior world-order, Schleiermacher did not find 
it necessary to lay any special emphasis upon the sharp, 
individualistic contrast between them. How often does 
he protest that he has no intention of separating religion 
from science and morality, and yet the very genius of 
his philosophic consists in nothing else. ' " True sci- 

Ba Op. cit., tr. Bjorkman, prologue. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 189 

ence," as he calls it, " is one with religion " ; this may 
well be, but, for Schleiermacher, " science " was a 
romantic affair peculiar to the genius of Schelling's 
Philosophy of Nature. With a noble conception of the 
exterior world before his eyes, Schleiermacher was able 
to reunite the temporarily isolated self of religious 
feeling with a romantic conception of both nature and 
humanity, so that the earlier portion of the memorable 
Second Discourse easily unites with the later part, which 
is given up to a contemplation of the naturalistic and 
humanistic orders. Others have been less fortunate in 
their calculations, as also in their literary reputations; 
and yet they have done no more than did Schleiermacher 
when he analyzed the mind of the religious man and 
contrasted this with the appearance of the exterior order. 
The career of nineteenth-century irreligion was marked 
by an ever-increasing intensification of the individual 
and an equally pronounced naturalization of the world, 
whence the genial ego and poetical world of Schleier- 
macher were sundered. The synthesis lost, irreligious 
individualism could do no more than insist upon the 
sanctity of the " I am." There was mysticism, not only 
in Schleiermacher, but also in Poe, as the latter's rather 
vapid philosophical essay, Eureka, with its norm of 
intuition, attests. But Poe advances beyond pure mys- 
ticism, just as he repudiates the didactic in poetry, and 
thus says of taste, " with the intellect or with conscience 
it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it 
has no concern whatever either with duty or with 
truth." 53 Schleiermacher may have been well nigh as 
strident, yet Schleiermacher bids adieu to the good and 
the true for a while only, while Poe is severing the 
connection forever. Abandoning the optimism of truth 
and goodness, Poe's pessimism turns toward sadness 
and melancholy, 54 the concrete realization of which 

K The Poetic Principle, in loc. M Philosophy of Composition, in loc. 



190 



THE GROUND AND GOAE OF HUMAN LIFE 



becomes manifest in his tales of terror, with all their 
morbid psychology. With the masters of the Decadence 
which was to follow, this pessimism became downright 
irreligion; and although the decadents did not exercise 
a conscious philosophy of history, their ideals had the 
effect of combining the romanticism of Schleiermacher 
with the pessimism of Poe. 

Having been of aid to individualism in asserting The 
Rights of Aestheticism, 55 Baudelaire contributed to the 
individualistic movement toward irreligion in that his 
aestheticism was capable of a mystical interpretation. 
There was mysticism in Blake's Satanism ; but the Satan- 
ism of Blake was healthy, robust, and strong, where 
the Satanism of Baudelaire was morbid, weak, and 
impassible. If Baudelaire constantly reverts to the most 
repulsive and distressing features of actual life, he is 
never the realist, but ever the splenetic idealist. In his 
eyes, virgins and demons, monsters and martyrs, saints 
and satyrs, had one common calling: to scorn the real 
and seek the infinite. 56 From this fearful idealism, 
nothing can drive the poet, not even the vision of flies 
hovering about a putrid corpse now infected with mag- 
gots. 57 In the presence of his morbid sense of beauty, 
Baudelaire lost sight of the most fundamental distinc- 
tions, good and bad, Abel and Cain, God and Satan; 
the sense of beauty was all that linked him with the 
most precious of his ideas, that of humanity, I'hwmanite 
vaste. Perhaps the error of Baudelaire consisted in his 
attempt to get out of humanity more than there is in it, 
in his desire to extend the borders of humanity out 
beyond their proper limits until they included here the 
bestial, there the diabolical. In his return to his inner- 
most soul, rentrant dans son time, Baudelaire went far 
beyond the limits of scientific introspection, which finds 
too little where he finds too much. Yet one cannot deny 

53 Cf. supra. B3 Femmcs Damnees, Fleurs du Mai, CXXXVI. 

'""lb., XXX. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 191 

that his morbid mysticism has its own value in estab- 
lishing the independence of the soul's inner life. 

To keep the soul and to sustain the soul's relations 
with both nature and humanity is the ideal toward which 
religion should approximate; of the two, the inward and 
the outward, the inner affirmation of the soul is more 
important than the outward expression of the soul's life 
in the natural and humanistic orders. Where Blake and 
Schleiermacher, both of them proceeding upon an irra- 
tionalistic basis, were able to maintain something like 
the outward relationships of the self with the world, 
Baudelaire and Wagner felt forced to violate the prin- 
ciples of objective scientism when they made their at- 
tempts to assert the self as something intrinsic. The 
history of Wagner's Siegfried serves to show how an 
irreligionist like Wagner can violate the principles of 
scientific justice for the sake of placing his individual 
upon an independent foundation. Wagner's anti-natur- 
alism shows itself all too clearly in the birth of Sieg- 
fried, whose parents were brother and sister; shocking 
to the moralistic Fricka, such incest is likely enough to 
prove equally offensive to contemporary science with its 
eugenics and race-culture. Yet the effects of such anti- 
naturalism seem to have been fortunate in that Siegfried 
was of all men an ideal of mens sana in corpore sano. 
Wagner's beau-ideal of the old order, the would-be nat- 
ural and moral Wotan, is forced to admit the superiority 
and supremacy of the irreligionist who stands out in 
strange contrast to the order of things which has been 
proved by scientific demonstration. Without fear, Sieg- 
fried is equally wanting in malice, so that he is fitted 
to play his part as enemy-friend, who opposes one order 
of things with the idea of establishing a better one. 
This friendly foe, der freundliche Feind, fights for 
Wotan in the act of fighting against him ; Siegfried wills 
what Wotan desires, and thus, in becoming the opponent 



192 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



of the real Wotan, he becomes the friend of Wotan's 
ideals. 58 Wagner's mystic irreligion is at once better 
and worse than that of Baudelaire: it is better because 
it is healthier; worse, since it is more militant. Yet 
both mystics agree in their attempt to safe-guard the 
human self from all exterior encroachments; Baudelaire 
goes deeper into the morbid regions of the self, while 
Wagner goes farther outward in opposition to the estab- 
lished order. Their bitterest foe is, not religion, science ; 
religion can comprehend the spirit of such irreligion 
where science is forced to dismiss it as irrational and 
dangerous. 

Where mysticism withdraws from the demonstrable 
order of things, irrationalism assumes a more threaten- 
ing attitude whence irrationalism opposes the scientific 
generalization called " truth." Nineteenth-century re- 
ligion, while insisting upon the freedom of the inner 
life, sought to maintain the usual connection between 
the self within and the established order without ; where, 
as in the memorable instance of Schleiermacher, religion 
could hardly abide by the older synthesis, it sought to 
re-relate the self to a world-order formulated in the 
spirit of a higher synthesis. Schleiermacher's ideas of 
nature and humanity, conceptions more liberal than those 
of scientism and sociality, show how a romanticist could 
save himself from irrationalism. Others, like Emerson 
and Stirner, have been less fortunate; these irrational- 
ists have found it necessary to negate all ostensible 
formulations of the world without, in order that they 
might safe-guard the self within. With Emerson and 
Stirner, the obvious method of the irrationalist was that 
of nominalism, whence a mediaeval method of thought 
was turned against the advanced ideas of modern think- 
ing. At heart, nominalistic thinking is a protest against 
the attempt to include the particular in the general, a 

83 Die WalJciire, II AM, II Sc. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 193 

protest against the subordination of the personal indi- 
vidual to the impersonal state. Generalization proceeds 
smoothly as long as the rationalist confines his attention 
to things sub-human, and no protest arises when stars 
become mere heavenly bodies, oaks mere trees, lions 
only animals ; but, when egos are subsumed under the 
concept man, or state, individualism must rise and pro- 
test against the fatal generalization. Thus it was with 
Stirner and Emerson, the one finding himself confronted 
by a Hegelian generalization, the other threatened by 
philosophic concepts in general. With all the varied 
forms of their common protest, these irrationalists have 
but one argument, the nominalistic. 

The irrationalism of Emerson resists all generaliza- 
tions ; that of Stirner opposes itself to the realm of 
things peculiar to ancient thought and the realm of 
ideas incident upon modern thinking. To all appear- 
ances, Stirner assumes the attitude of one who opposes 
truth; yet, when the truth is the truth of selfhood, he 
is ready to make truth his own. In this manner, Stirner 
answers Pilate's question, for he declares that truth is, 
not in things, not in ideas, but in the self. " If," says 
he, " the things of the world have once become vain, 
the thoughts of the spirit must also become vain." 59 
In the midst of this relinquishment of both things and 
thoughts, the truths of ancient and modern, the ego may 
still possess his own self in which the truth is to be 
found. In his essay, Nominalist and Realist, Emerson 
does not fail to appreciate that which impelled mediae- 
val realism to perfect its generalizations ; but that which 
is meat to the idea is poison to the individual. Hence, 
Emerson's nominalism counsels the individual to " insist 
upon imperfection " and to " embroil the confusion." 
The idea at hand is that the individual shall surrender 
his differentia and thus submit to the generalization; 

60 The Ego and His Own, tr. Byington, 478. 



I 9 4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the motive, while ostensibly individualistic, is none the 
less favorable to the idea which seeks to surround the 
individual in those limiting circles so dear to the logician. 
In this spirit, Emerson expressed the desire that " the 
universe might be kept open in all directions." It is 
at this point that Emerson tends to differ from Stirner; 
for, where Stirner opposes all formulations of truth, 
where Stirner would have truth consist of the egoistic 
point rather than any conceptualistic circumference, 
Emerson seems to express the hope that there may be 
a generalization fit to contain even the free self. Both, 
however, agree in discarding any system which raises 
truth above the individual; for his own part, Stirner 
out-Hegels Hegel in that Stirner turns about and raises 
the self above truth. 

Far from being a scholastic discussion, the irration- 
alism of Emerson and Stirner was a determined effort 
to raise the self above all definite formulations of life. 
To set the self in opposition to the world, one must have 
supreme confidence in that self while he must have also 
a correspondingly inferior conception of all forms of 
establishment. The " true " of scientism must become 
the false of individualism, and vice versa; the reasoning 
is correct, but there is all the difference in the world 
between the two kinds of premises employed: here, it 
is said, All that is in harmony with the general idea is 
true; there, it is affirmed, All that is in agreement with 
the individual is true. Emerson at once decided in favor 
of the individualistic formulation of the true, whence 
he refused to regard the ego as but a " bastard and 
interloper in the world which existed for him." With 
Stirner, this egoistic truth, often expressed in terms of 
immoralism and diabolism, finds its clearest declaration 
when Stirner refuses to allow that the individual can 
conform to the concept Man; and when he asks the 
question, " Who is man ? " Stirner can only respond, 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 195 

" I am." In the minds of both these irrationalists, the 
" I am " is the supreme truth, yet they differ between 
themselves in their attitude toward it. Where Emerson 
is so optimistic as to assume that the individual really 
exists, Stirner's pessimism leads him to lament that the 
self does not yet exist, so that the " I am " is only an 
ideal. Where man is egoist, his egoism is not of his 
own volition, since man spends all his strength in elab- 
orating a concept to which he can subordinate himself; 
as an " involuntary egoist," man is not really himself ; 
even Stirner cannot truthfully affirm his own selfhood, 
whence he says, " I am as little my heart as I am my 
sweetheart." 60 

The truth of the individual is superior to the truth 
of all generalizations, such as State and Church, Reason 
and Mankind. Emerson feels that " the world is gov- 
erned too much," while he demands that the State keep 
its hands off the " Kingdom of the me." Stirner was 
no less determined in his antipathy to the objective order, 
so that we hear him complaining that reason " puts the 
individual in irons by the thought of humanity." 61 
Relief from such tyranny of the " true " must come 
from the irrationalist himself ; if he negate the premises, 
no conclusion can be drawn. According to Emerson- 
ianism, private wisdom and private goodness are supe- 
rior to the organization of the true and the good. The 
essay on Politics, has this additional bit of individual- 
ism : " To educate the wise man, the State appears ; 
and, with the appearance of the wise man, the State 
expires." Yet, in his egoistic reading of history, Emer- 
son cannot " call to mind a single human being who 
has steadily denied the authority of the laws on the 
simple ground of his own moral nature." Now, both 
Emerson and Stirner afford unusually fair examples of 
just such a non-conformist. 

m The Ego, 40. ^ lb., 137. 

13 



196 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

The contrast between these two similar types of irra- 
tionalism and irreligion appears when one attempts to 
sum up the ultimate meaning of their respective mes- 
sages. Stirner would tolerate no conceptualism what- 
ever, but persisted in making the ego the supreme object 
of truth and worship; at the same time, Stirner con- 
tented himself with the mere elevation of himself above 
the established order, so that his deed was ever an ego- 
istic and, we may say, a harmless one. An " insurgent," 
Stirner insists that he was not a " revolutionist." 62 But, 
while mild in will, Stirner is so ferocious as to forbid 
any attempt to subordinate the truth of the me to any 
so-called higher idea, so that his position is most defi- 
nitely that of the irrationalist who will not sanction the 
use of the Socratic concept. For his part, Emerson 
was more militant in things volitional, less so in things 
intellectual. When he speaks of the State, Emerson's 
utterances are thoroughly anarchistic, while he deems 
all State-philosophy hopelessly conservative. Society 
means to Emerson a " foul compromise and vituperated 
Sodom " ; on the other hand, " a state of war or an- 
archy is so far valuable in that it puts every man on 
trial." 63 When, however, the intellect Emersonian at- 
tempts to settle accounts with the world of things, it 
cannot place the affair of the individual upon the naught 
of Stirner, but promptly subordinates the ego to the 
Over Soul. In this manner, Emerson sought relief in 
the mysticism which had meant so much to Schleier- 
macher. Yet both Emerson and Stirner as irrational- 
ists are able to agree in affirming that the given order 
of things in the worlds of nature and humanity cannot 
be found to contain man as ego. 

Where the " religion of science " was formerly op- 
posed by mysticism and irrationalism, it has now come 
under the ban of symbolism, where it encounters the 

63 The Ego, 422-423. e3 The Conservative, in loc. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 197 

opposition of Verlaine and Villiers de L/Isle Adam. 
Symbolism may lack the ability to frame its principles 
after the manner of either irrationalism or mysticism, 
but where it loses on the positive side, it gains in its 
negative attitude toward scientism. In this way, sym- 
bolism has become a philosophy of humanistic values in 
the light of which it asserts, " science will not suffice." 
Now, to assert the insufficiency of science is the next 
thing to asserting science's falsity; further more, sym- 
bolism asserts that it has been the popularization of 
science which has led to the undoing which science is 
destined to undergo in the future. From a more care- 
fully assumed point of view, the truth implicit in sym- 
bolism may be stated as follows : Scientism, or the 
direct application of the principles of physical science 
to the needs of the human mind, fails to suffice for the 
answering of most pertinent questions about the world 
as a whole, fails again when it seeks to assuage the 
most poignant needs of intimate human life. That 
which is destined to prove its destruction is its own direct 
application of the physical to the social, whence the 
inferiority of scientism as a philosophy and religion 
cannot fail to become apparent. Popular science as 
such may hardly be said to have attempted the solution 
of the life-problem; but social scientism has attempted 
just this thing, as the history of Positivism from Comte 
to Spencer is sure to point out. Is it not such social 
scientism which has been challenged by the symbolist 
philosophers, Paulhan, Rod, Desjardins, and Morice? 
The poet of symbolism has presented the claims of the 
human soul; its philosopher has shown that such needs 
cannot be satisfied by social scientism. 

According to Morice, the thought of the nineteenth 
century, beginning with I' esprit mystique of Chateau- 
briand and V esprit scientifique of Goethe, followed the 
streams of romanticism and naturalism until it found 



198 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

a triune synthesis in Villiers, Verlaine, and Mallarme, 
where it framed the proper reaction against the " inso- 
lent and desolate negations of scientific literature." 64 
When one desires to know just how the scientific spirit 
will be relegated to its proper place, the philosophy of 
symbolism seeks to show that art will take its stand 
upon science, there to find a solid foundation for its 
upward striving intuitions. 65 The pretensions of sci- 
ence, or scientism as we should say, appear in the calm 
denial of mystery which has accompanied the calcu- 
lating mind; in its analysis, scientism witnesses its own 
dissolution, whence the way for a higher synthesis is 
prepared. 

In the attempt to elaborate a higher synthesis, which 
is the only just aim of an individualism which has spent 
enough time in its anti-natural, anti-social operations, it 
must be borne in mind that there is a difference between 
science as such, where observed fact and demonstrable 
relation cannot be questioned, and scientism, which at- 
tempts to deduce a life-ideal from the organized data 
peculiar to the inorganic and organic worlds. The 
fundamental principles of physics, chemistry, and biology 
may be perfected without any philosophical or poetical 
interference or criticism ; but when the scientist attempts 
to dictate human emotions and volitions, he has trans- 
gressed his limits, and must endure the rebuke which 
is forthcoming from humanism. " Science will not 
suffice" ; that motto of advanced individualism is to be 
taken in its humanistic sense; for, as a matter of fact, 
science must suffice for the explanation of those data 
which are given in the experience of both the physical 
and psychological; the insufficiency appears when this 
science, or scientism, attempts to solve problems of 
human life, in both the individual and society. 

According to the symbolist philosophy of Morice, it 

<» La Litterature de Tout a L'Reure, 177. M lb., 203. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 199 

is the popularization of science which leads to its dis- 
integration. 66 From the analysis of the present situ- 
ation, we have been led to the conclusion that it has 
been the socialization of science that is leading to the 
decline of the scientific regime. The thinker of the 
Enlightenment who was confronted by the enormous 
ideas of the new physics was able to pursue his philo- 
sophy of life undismayed, because the science of that 
time was confined to its proper limits in the physical 
world. The idealism of Kant, with its superior ethics, 
found nothing disconcerting in the physical conceptions 
of the world, while Kant himself loaned his name and 
influence to the problems of astronomy. Similar was 
it in the case of Goethe, who maintained a superior 
philosophy of life in sympathy with the scientific notions 
of his day. But, when, as in the case of Comte, sci- 
entism is pursued, not for its own sake, but with the 
confessed aim of dictating a doctrine of life inimical 
to the spiritual interests of the human self, the repudi- 
ation of such scientism is sure to come about. 

Only as we observe how arrogant popular scientism 
has become are we able to comprehend the antipathy 
which contemporary thought entertains for it. In the 
history of the nineteenth century, the conflict between 
the naturalistic and the humanistic was carried in con- 
nection with science and religion; and, because religion 
clung to an absurd cosmology, science was able to create 
the impression that, in negating this, it was negating all 
mysticism, all belief in interior existence. Neither by 
scientism nor by religion was it observed that art was 
taking up the defence of the inner life, so that the real 
conflict of that period was the conflict between art and 
science. The Renaissance was able to pursue the sci- 
entific and the aesthetical without a suspicion of any 
conflict between the twin domains, as appears most 

69 La Litterature de Tout d L'Heure, 5-6. 



2oo THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

strikingly in the case of Leonardo da Vinci. In the 
nineteenth century, where the interest in science has 
been comparable to that of the fifteenth, but where 
there has been no comparable development in the realm 
of art, the time-spirit was called upon to witness the 
rash ascendancy of the scientific spirit, whence the ex- 
tremes to which aesthetic individualism was forced to 
go. If religion had had no antiquated cosmology to 
defend, and had not held its picture of the phenomenal 
world dearer than its sense of inner life, the conflict 
between science and religion would not have resulted 
in the victory for science. Even worse did this situation 
become when religion sought to evince the harmony of 
the two views, the naturalistic and the spiritual; for, 
in so doing, religion tended to lose its hold upon the 
essential principles of faith. The bathos of religion 
appears to-day in the surrender of the spiritual to the 
social, a second victory for scientism. 

Art has the advantage over religion, inasmuch as art 
has never had a special cosmology to defend; it is not 
with the forms of the visible world that art has to do, 
but with the aesthetical value which may be attributed 
to them. At the same time, art has never assumed any 
great responsibility for the social order, so that, in its 
independence of both the physical and the social, art 
has been able to intensify the interests of interior life 
as such. Science has filled the mind with ideas, things 
natural and social, and that without thinking to inquire 
concerning the values which might be attached to these. 
In this manner, the idea of beauty in nature has been 
all but lost, while the sense of worth, which can be 
determined only as one centers his attention upon the 
individual, has suffered from neglect. Not in the special 
doctrine of symbolism, as this is portrayed artistically 
by Villiers, and analyzed philosophically by Morice, but 
in the universal principle of art, is the higher synthesis 



THE STRUGGLE FOR SELFHOOD 201 

of nature and humanity to be found. Now, Morice's 
ideal, Tout Vhomme pour tout I'art, carries him beyond 
mere symbolism, with its triumvirate of Villiers, Ver- 
laine, and Mallarme. 67 Itself, Symbolism tended to up- 
hold the sacerdotal rather than the irrationalistic ; never- 
theless, Symbolism was as far removed from the scien- 
tific conception of nature as the earlier forms of irre- 
ligion had been. 

With the climax of irreligion, the Struggle for Self- 
hood comes to a conclusion. Called forth in opposition 
to a conception of nature which forbade the independ- 
ence of soul-states, free initiatives, and self-affirmed 
ideals, the struggle for selfhood exerted itself in the 
elaboration of the joy, worth, and truth of life. Under 
more optimistic auspices, such individualism might have 
come to its conclusion without indulging in those po- 
lemics which involved the joy of life as exaggerated 
aestheticism, the worth of life as immoralism, and the 
truth of life as irrationalism and irreligion; under the 
conditions imposed by the authoritarian thought of the 
age, the pessimistic conclusion seemed to be necessary, 
so that individualism did not hesitate to draw it. Had 
science been science and not scientism, had science con- 
tented itself with the rational comprehension of the nat- 
ural order, there had been no excuse for such attitudes 
as were indicated by aestheticism, immoralism, and irre- 
ligion; but, when scientism sought to thrust upon the 
human spirit an authoritarian conception of life as some- 
thing purely natural and social, the inward revolution 
peculiar to individualism could not be avoided. Many 
phases of such individualism might be regretted were 
it not for the fact that they, although offensive in the 
extreme, are still nearer the meaning of man's life than 
the accepted truths of scientism can ever hope to be. 
The red and yellow of Baudelaire and Verlaine are 
more pleasing than the drab of Comte and Spencer. 

87 Litterature de Tout & L'Heure, 269. 



BOOK TWO 
THE GOAL OF LIFE IN SOCIETY 



BOOK TWO 
THE GOAL OF LIFE IN SOCIETY 

AS the modern attempt on the part of scientism 
to naturalize human life produced an intoler- 
able condition in the realm of things specu- 
lative, it must now be asked whether the modern social- 
ization of life is destined to be more promising. Both 
movements go hand in hand in our modern thinking; 
the earlier period of modern thought established a union 
of physics and politics, while the later one repeated this 
performance when it connected the physical with the 
social. As a result, individualism has had to assert the 
self in opposition to the fixedness of the inorganic world 
and to rescue it from the relentless flux of modern bio- 
logical scientism. Perhaps individualism, with its strug- 
gle for the joy, worth, and truth of life, has not been 
able to witness the defeat of scientism at the hands of 
selfhood; but it has been able to point out that the 
scientific generalization has been unable to draw a circle 
about the self with its deep content and strong affirm- 
ation, as it was able to do with less independent forms 
of nature. The conflict with the physical, forms but 
one half of the general struggle for the independence 
of the self, so that the career of individualism is marked 
by a parallel form of strife in connection with which 
the self is called upon to adjust its nature and character 
to that social philosophy which accompanied the physico- 
scientific movement. In the attempt to think his own 
thoughts, the individual must observe how scientism 
tends to dominate the whole realm of intellectual life; 
to do his own deeds, the same individual must not fail 
to observe how sociality presumes to exercise authority 
in the realm of activity. As we must keep reminding 



2 o6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ourselves, the culture of the age is such as to insist upon 
the following propositions : truth is that which is scien- 
tific; worth or goodness is that which is social. 

The attitude of individualistic logic has not been such 
as to further the prejudice that all thinking about the 
world must be elaborated and expressed after the man- 
ner of scientific thinking. It is undeniable that polemi- 
cal egoism has been unwilling and unable to establish 
any sort of cosmic philosophy, although it has not failed 
to assert the intrinsic essence and character of man's 
spiritual life in general. When now individualism en- 
counters the social, individualism will be found to assume 
an inimical attitude toward the attempt to construct all 
human goodness in the spirit of sociality. As soon as 
individualism becomes aware of the socialization of life, 
even before it is clearly conscious of this amiable tend- 
ency of the modern mind, it attempts a counter asser- 
tion in behalf of man's inner life. The social synthesis 
appears to be a poor vehicle for conveying the essential 
meaning of human striving and suffering. As in its 
conflict with the naturalistic synthesis in the world of 
things, individualism carries on its warfare with the 
social synthesis in the world of persons by discussing, 
(i) The Socialization of Life and (2) The Repudiation 
of Society. 



PART ONE 
THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 

THE naturalization of human life was brought 
about by modern physics and biology, according 
to which the earth was adjusted to the universe 
and man to the earth. No longer is there a privileged 
planet in the universe, no longer a privileged being in 
the earth; the form of human life has become scientific, 
its content social. With the naturalization and social- 
ization of man's life, the powers of thinking and doing 
have been taken from the individual as such and rele- 
gated to the world at large. The result is that the self 
cannot continue to say, " I think " and " I will," but 
" thought goes on within the brain " and "work is done 
through the will." For a while — that is, during the 
Enlightenment — the individual was able to keep abreast 
of the exterior order by reposing in a speculative solips- 
ism and a practical egoism ; indeed, the quasi-individual- 
ism of that time was such as to persuade man that his 
simple " I think " and " I will " were of such power as 
to place the self in ascendancy over the world ; but such 
a na'ive assumption was not destined to endure. No 
longer can the individual assert that his thought estab- 
lishes the universe, for it is doubtful whether his thought 
can even establish the self as thinker; no longer can the 
ego presume that its will makes the social order, for it 
is problematic whether the will is able to assert even 
the self. The method adopted by individualism when 
individualism became a genuine doctrine, was a de- 
structive rather than a constructive method; and, from 
being a tyrant, the self became a mere insurrecto. 
Under the auspices of sociality, the human self, no 
longer sovereign, became a solitaire whose sole life- 



2o8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

satisfaction was to be found in the enjoyment of a life- 
content in no wise related to the exterior order of either 
things or persons. The insertion of the individual is 
thus the starting-point of essential individualism. 

I. THE TRANSVALTJATION OF SELF AND 
SOCIETY 

Just as the naturalization of human life was inaugu- 
rated by the complete transmutation of mind and world, 
so the socialization of life was brought about by an 
equally decisive transvaluation of self and society. With 
no fixed notion of either ancient State or mediaeval 
Church, the modern elaborated the looser ideal of Soci- 
ety, which latter was now inferior, then superior, to the 
self. Although calm thinking might lead to the sup- 
position that the ideas of self and society were recip- 
rocal, the vigorous ethics of modern life has persisted 
in pitting one against the other, so that no sense of 
consistency, no feeling of peace, is possible. If one is 
content to be purely social, he will feel no disturbances 
from the ego within; if he is capable of individualistic 
retirement, such as one has witnessed in our recent 
Symbolists, he may assume that the social order is 
nothing to him; but, if one feels that he must believe 
in both the self and society, he will be at a loss to com- 
prehend how the synthesis of the two may be brought 
about. The supreme error in the ethics of the Enlight- 
enment consisted in the assertion that, in the logic of 
life, the self is prior, the state secondary; the present 
age may be just as faulty in its assumption that it is 
the social which holds the position of moral priority. 
That which individualism feels forced to observe and 
to emphasize is the melancholy fact of the transvalu- 
ation of the self and society as this took place at the 
close of the Enlightenment. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 209 

I. SSWHOOD IN SWINISHNESS 

When the Enlightenment encountered the ego, it sub- 
mitted it to an ethical treatment the exact parallel of 
the metaphysical office to which the logician had assigned 
it. As Descartes used the inviolate " I think " to 
establish the world of things, Hobbes employed the 
egoistic " I will " to establish the society of persons. 
Neither thinker was willing to rejoice in the solitary 
character of the punctual ego; had there been less 
anxiety about nature and society, the situation in philo- 
sophy had been different to-day. The anthropology of 
both Descartes and Hobbes, elaborated with the char- 
acteristic swiftness of early modern thought, was sadly 
in error. When the speculative thinker analyzed man, 
he found within his mind nothing but a solitary thinking 
of one's own thoughts ; when the practical philosopher 
made his study de homine, he could discover nothing 
but the impulse toward self-assertion, the will-to-self- 
hood which seems so difficult for the egoist of to-day. 
In the seventeenth century, it was assumed that prac- 
tical life may assume nothing but the ego ; if the social 
order is to come in, its entrance depends upon the atti- 
tude of the self-centered ego. The thought that the 
social order is most thoroughly in control so that self- 
hood can come into being only after the most strenuous 
and destructive kinds of self-assertion, seems never to 
have occurred to these naive moralists. In contra- 
distinction from the ideals of the Enlightenment, we 
are able to see, and quite pathetically, that one has no 
more need to urge man to be social than he has reason 
to bid the wind to blow or the tide to rise. The evolu- 
tionary character of our thought is such as to prepare 
a social place for man before he makes his appearance 
upon the planet, since evolution marks the presence of 
the social in lower than human forms of animal life. 
With her epic interests, nature has been careful to make 



2io THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

arrangement for the organization of life upon earth, 
whence the might of the gregarious tendency. Upon 
such a desperately social planet as ours, all attempts to 
enhance sociality as such are unnecessary. The little 
nucleus of pure selfishness, which seemed to Hobbes as 
the dominant feature of human life, has not the power 
to withstand the universal and ceaseless tendency on the 
part of men to congregate in such a manner as to perfect 
socialized life and socialized labor. 

Like the speculative thought of the Enlightenment, 
the practical philosophy of the period found the ego so 
easily that the need of the will-to-selfhood was never 
called into play. The individualism of that day arrived 
by following the line of least resistance, while the ethical 
effort of philosophy was all but exhausted in making 
out a case for the social instinct. To-day, when the 
social is in the saddle, we look with amazement at the 
seriousness and vigor with which the seventeenth-century 
moralist sought to evince the existence of what is so 
obvious as the social instinct. Then, however, it was 
feared that the selfishness of man might drive from the 
world all possibility of benevolence. In Grotius' philo- 
sophy of rights, the problem of the individual and his 
relation to society receives its first systematic presen- 
tation. Before Grotius, Machiavelli and More, Bodin 
and Gentilis, had recognized the presence of the prob- 
lem, but it remained for the author of The Rights of 
War and Peace (1625) to make it basal. Now Grotius' 
conception of man and society was elaborated so readily 
that both individualist and social thinker may complain 
that his ideal fails to receive sufficient consideration. 
The ego was not so ripe for the fruit-basket of the state, 
while the social organism, as we affect to call it to-day, 
was poorly developed in the conception of society by 
mutual agreement. But, where Grotius did not see fit 
to indulge the anarchistic ideal in his world of social 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 2 li 

men, he was radical in his suggestion that the state may 
be conceived of in an atheistic manner. With a hesi- 
tation which was to be expected, Grotius thus declares 
that jus nahtrale would hold, even under the supposition 
" that there is no God — non esse deum." 1 

Grotius' extreme confidence in the rationality and 
morality of man, whereby he neglects the anarchistic 
while not shunning the atheistic postulate, is shown in 
the social idealism with which he colors his human 
heroes. Man is the quiet and orderly animal to whom 
society is native — homini proprhim sociale; for he is 
possessed of a social appetite, while the special gift of 
language, which in the mind of Grotius has the single 
motive of communication, further fits him for social 
life. 2 Nature has thus made men kinsmen; hence jus 
nahtrale, which might be supposed to isolate and mutu- 
ally antagonize men, makes the perfecting of society an 
easy task. 

But the progress of the modern philosophy of rights 
was not at all in accord with this optimism, as the pes- 
simism of Hobbes and the attempted reconciliation of 
Grotius and Hobbes by Puffendorf was destined to show. 
The egoistic nature of man and the severity of the social 
contract necessary for the assembling of such self-cen- 
tered individuals, thus place the social philosophy of the 
Enlightenment in a position where it became necessary 
to look deeper into the sources of human action. Hobbes 
differed from Grotius, not only upon the grounds that 
he was a Scotist who believed that moral laws spring 
from the will, where Grotius in his Thomism had found 
them fixed and finished in the intellect, but in the more 
modern interpretation, which led Hobbes to assume a 
position materialistic and egoistic. With the removal of 
reason, as this was followed from the materialistic hypo- 
thesis, the man of Hobbes was enclosed within his own 

1 De Jure Belli et Pads, Proleg., § 11. "lb., 6-7. 

14 



212 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

private being, a victim of the baser and more violent 
tendencies of his nature. Social life, so foreign to a 
creature which cannot see beyond its own immediate 
feelings, was to be brought about, not naturally and 
serenely, but by means of a principle of force calculated 
to offset the native force of selfishness within the indi- 
vidual will. Yet, in our desire to discover the extent 
and degree to which the egoistic principle took root in 
the Enlightenment, we must not attribute to the indi- 
vidual of Hobbes any more moment than we are ready 
to attach to the social principle in Grotius. Hobbes' 
description of the ego in his own world can afford only 
a pathetic contrast to the analysis of the self as one now 
finds it in the writings of Stirner and Baudelaire, of 
Nietzsche and Wilde; for there is little in the Levia- 
than to suggest the presence of the Nietzschian " Blond 
Beast " in the world. One thus marvels that such an 
improbable ego should have aroused the terrible forces 
of altruism which made British morality famous, a blind 
altruism which did not cease with the coming of Mill, 
but persisted to the end of the nineteenth century until 
the death of Sidgwick. The founder of the pseudo- 
egoistic philosophy was possessed of a peculiar philo- 
sophy of history in accordance with which mankind was 
conceived to have passed from the free status naturalis 
to the fixed status civilis. With such notions in mind, 
Hobbes looks upon nature as the disintegrating, self- 
conscious reason as the synthesizing force. " It may 
seem strange to some man who has not well weighed 
these things," says he, " that nature should thus dis- 
sociate and render men apt to invade and destroy one 
another." 3 Yet all that Hobbes can allow to the nat- 
ural synthesis of men in nature is the sense of wonder 
that anything else should be the case. 

When one realizes how synthetic is the force of nature, 

3 Leviathan, Ch. XIV. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 213 

which latter constantly organizes things in groups, one 
finds it difficult to understand how the Enlightenment 
struggled to prove the existence of the social sentiment, 
and how, when it was in psychological possession of 
this obvious factor, it still continued to insist that the 
social creature become more and more social. One may 
perhaps exercise some sympathy for Cumberland and 
Shaftesbury, Hume and Adam Smith, who lived at a 
time when scientism had not emphasized the sociality 
inherent in its conception of nature; but one is far from 
agreeing with Mill, whose unnecessary and obviously 
fallacious argument for society was phrased as follows : 
" Each person's happiness is a good to that person, and 
the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate 
of all persons : " * Sidgwick's predicament is equally 
pathetic. Alarmed at the gap in Mill's argument, and 
with a wistful glance in the direction of universal hap- 
piness so far away, Sidgwick casts aside his poor utili- 
tarianism to embrace the theory of an opposed intuition- 
ism as he assumes the validity of rational benevolence 
as an " intuition." 5 Thus was the all-obvious social 
tendency, common to animals and men, reduced to 
" demonstration." Alas ! poor Stirner. 

With the advent of the social philosophy of Comte, 
the balance of power changed from the ego to society. 
No longer was it necessary to rise in the defence of 
the vast, omnipotent social order; on the contrary, it 
was noted, that something must be done for the self. 
To-day, when the social ideal is at the apex, we see 
how difficult it is to account for and justify the inner 
independence of the human self. From the Leviathan 
of the social mind no corner of the ego is free; all 
privacy, all individuality is apparently lost in the resist- 
less rush of the objective, social tendency. Our ideas 
are circled by the opinions and prejudices of the race; 

* Utilitarianism, Ch. IV. s Methods of Ethics, Bk. Ill, Ch. XIII. 



214 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



our ideals have lost their centrifugal impulse from 
within, and must await the beck of the social organism. 
The readiness with which the moral mind stepped into 
this trap is paralleled only by the dread of egoism which 
caused British ethics to elaborate its gigantic system of 
utilitarianism. To match it, we have the absurd social 
philosophy of the day. Then, the anti-egoistic ideal 
was developed in desperation; now, the social principle 
is indulged with smug satisfaction. The social has 
become popular, which in itself is a most suspicious 
circumstance; and there is nothing which has been left 
untouched by its tentacles, nothing human which its 
omnivorous appetite would not devour. 

If the social thought of the day were content to con- 
fine itself to the exterior phases of our humanity, we 
could offer no lasting lament; but the influence of this 
realistic method of reasoning is internal and invidious. 
The weak conscience has succumbed to such a degree 
that to suggest the possibly anti-social character of any 
initiative is sufficient to produce a benumbing com- 
punction. Earth has become the herding planet, and 
it is not impossible that astronomy will gain a glimpse 
of the group system in operation upon Mars. Because 
of this extra-socialization of human life, the position 
of egoism is just the opposite of that which it occupied 
in the Enlightenment, where it was disowned as soon 
as recognized. As a result, egoism is on the defensive; 
armed within against the objective forces of. the social 
order, it expresses itself with a vigor which, it must be 
confessed, is as misleading as it is unworthy. Where 
we can offer the explanation that only by such savage 
self-assertion can the ego hope to keep its place in life, 
we cannot add to this psychological argument an 
ethical one which shall justify the extremes of Stirner, 
Nietzsche, and Wilde. We keep them in mind while 
we are seeking the ego's place in society, but it is only 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 215 

in a casual manner that we can follow their arguments. 
This much remains as established in the philosophy of 
humanity : that man is not by nature an ego, but a 
social being; he becomes an ego only by means of the 
will-to-selfhood. No longer dare we take the ego for 
granted ; the ego must be brought into being from within 
by the individual. The recognition of this is necessary 
to egoists and altruists alike. 

The career of egoism and altruism, as this has been 
recorded in ethical history, is filled with that which is 
both pathetic and provoking. How has it been possible 
for human thinking to align its ideals and lay down its 
maxims, when so little comprehension of humanity was 
attained? Why has ethics encased us human beings in 
its rigid forms and inflicted us with its ideals when no 
attention was paid to anthropology? Both of our mod- 
ern periods, that of Enlightenment and that of culture, 
have indulged the most erroneous notions concerning 
the place of the self in society, although our own period 
of thought has not failed to drop some hint as to the 
soul's method of escape from the social snare. Where, 
in the earlier epoch, the ideal consisted in passing from 
the self to society, the more advanced ideal cheers us 
with the thought that the self should free man from the 
social. Then the question was, How shall we socialize 
man? Now we are asking, How shall we individualize 
the social mass? Not that the latter question is ever 
frankly proposed by our social thinker, but that he has 
made the social so commonplace, so obnoxious, that the 
enlightened egoist has no trouble in observing what he 
should do. Where man was thoroughly individualized, 
it was but natural that moral thinking should search 
for some path to the social order; but when the social 
method became paramount, it became necessary for the 
individual to assert his selfhood. Now it may seem 
strange that the modern egoist can survey the course 



216 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of the elder individualism with little or no satisfaction, 
but the fact remains that the genealogy of the superman 
does not trace back to the ego of Hobbes' system. The 
older individualism was insincere, incomplete, involun- 
tary; the newer egoism is straightforward, systematic, 
and relentless. Man must assert himself, must will 
himself. 

In our dismay, as we witness the expulsion of the 
ego from his own world, we turn from scientific to 
social thought, with the hope that, by considering the 
individual in the atmosphere of humanism rather than 
in the drab world of scientism, we may catch some 
glimpse of the self. Here, the situation is even more 
distressing, for the reason that, where scientific thought 
merely neglects the self, social thinking arrays its argu- 
ments against self-existence and self-expression. Where 
science can find no explanation for the ego, social thought 
refuses to grant it justification. The self does not exist; 
such is the testimony of the one. The self has no right 
to think of existing; that is the conclusion of the other. 
The earth has been mapped out in such a manner as to 
lead to the conclusion that, since so much of its surface 
is covered by the seas of society, the firm land of self- 
hood has no existence at all. Individuality is expelled 
because it is unsocial; genius is condemned as patho- 
logical. The explanation of this unhappy situation may 
be attributed to certain leading considerations which the 
social thinker has had in mind. In his life-ideal, the social 
thinker has viewed man from the economic standpoint 
as the creature that must be housed, clothed, and fed; 
the thought that man must none the less have culture 
and inner life, has been overlooked in the description of 
his life in the world. At the same time, the modern 
apostle of humanity has surrendered to the democratic 
ideal, which is based upon the principle of likeness 
rather than that of difference in humanity. Now the 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



217 



individual is " different." For this reason, the social 
generalization, which described man in its formal man- 
ner, cannot accommodate a phase of humanity in which 
the generic and conferential are lost to view in the 
specific and differential. By its very nature, social 
thought is pledged to the mass, not the ego ; the result 
follows rapidly, is established rigidly. 

Some justification for the anti-individualistic tendency 
in social thought may be found in the failure of egoism 
to explain what it means by " being one's self." It is 
only in recent decades that the need of such an explan- 
ation has been felt. Up to the present time, humanity 
has had examples of individualism, but these have not 
always been genuine and straightforward. There has 
been an egoism which in many ways has been but a 
spurious individualism, the product of exterior rather 
than interior forces. The ancient aristocracy of mind 
and the mediaeval sense of a superiority based upon 
religion may have escaped the taint of spuriousness ; 
but it was wanting in the internal sense of individual- 
ism of which, to-day, we are so conscious, which we 
praise so highly. The aesthetic supremacy of humanity 
in the Renaissance is perhaps the nearest approach to 
conscious, self-directed individualism that history has 
furnished; it was not wanting in excellence, nor was it 
lacking in the egoism which the earlier ages confessed. 
In modern times, aristocracy has failed to achieve indi- 
vidualism for the reason that it has been founded upon 
exteriority. French aristocracy, instead of basing itself 
upon the principles of intellectualism which were then 
at hand, contented itself with the externals of human 
life, so that the result was a sort of dandyism, so great 
was the emphasis laid upon the manners. In the nine- 
teenth century, when democracy became the rule, the 
aristocracy that grew up was economic, the lowest type 
that the world has seen. Those who to-day are feared 



218 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

and lauded are those whose possessions are the greatest, 
not those who culture, piety, and manners are the finest. 
Our modern " egos " do indeed have somewhat of the 
power and noble insolence which ever characterize the 
individual, but they are wanting in superior self-con- 
sciousness which is born of the sense of mental and 
moral supremacy. Their " personality " is an accretion, 
not a growth; it is built around them, not produced 
from within by them. Commerce has supplanted culture 
to the degree of making personality self-effacing, so that 
the capitalist does not dream how he, in more ways than 
one, has approached to the ideal of the superman. 

Now, to be a superman, one must first of all be con- 
scious of his superiority. Furthermore, he must be 
possessed of an originality which, instead of recognizing 
the law that he breaks, refuses to grant the law the 
recognition of either intellect or will. He who in his 
egoism postulates an esoteric principle of thinking and 
acting must be possessed of a peculiar dialectical power 
in the light of which he is able to conceive of both a 
lower and higher standard of life; but such an ancient 
method of reasoning is far beyond the ability of the 
capitalist to formulate. On the contrary, it has been 
lack of consciousness, not the excess of it, which has 
had the effect of elaborating the " personality " of the 
financier; he has been unaware of both himself and 
society in the activities of an exteriorizing will. Indi- 
vidualism, therefore, has not had sufficient material to 
work upon, whence it has been natural for social think- 
ing to overlook the claims to self-existence which are 
implicit in the ego. Before the overwhelming social 
consideration, the slender forces of individualism as 
such have been powerless, so that the chief hope of 
individualism consists in the rednctio ad absurdum to 
which the social argument must lead. 

Relief from the social is no more readily forthcoming 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



219 



in the more restricted field of ethical thought. Such is 
the situation here that one is led to feel that his position 
is shameful when he seeks to call himself an " egoist." 
Both the feeling of personal pleasure and the private 
moral sense have succumbed to the invincible social 
argument. The eudaemonistic ideal of egoism was the 
first to appear and the first to yield. In the history of 
modern ethics, there is scarcely to be found a genuine 
argument for the enjoyment of life as this is understood 
by the individual. Hobbes was never proud of his posi- 
tion, while Mandeville was not able to convince men 
of his sincerity. It may even be said that Butler, in 
his Sermons on Human Nature, was the only English 
thinker of the Enlightenment to exalt self-love, which 
he qualifies with the adjectives " cool " and " reason- 
able." 6 Butler, however, proposes an egoism whose 
final form was moralistic rather than hedonistic; and 
his brave egoism is but the preparation for his more 
characteristic ideal of conscience. Indeed, where Butler 
tends to identify the two, the resulting synthesis con- 
sists of a moral attitude in which conscience is thor- 
oughly supreme. But, even in the attempt to elaborate 
an ethical egoism, the thought of the day, as this was 
expressed by Adam Smith, showed a tendency to social- 
ize both conscience and self-love. Since his day, we 
have witnessed the absolute socialization of the moral 
sense, so that, in both his desires and his moral strivings, 
man has been forced to guide his actions by an external 
social norm. If morality has gained, individuality has 
lost; and we are now confronted by a social absolutism 
thorough and relentless. Thus, as we review the earlier 
period of modern thought, and seek also to come to 
understanding with the present, we can only conclude 
that the human ego has been banished from the world 
of nature and humanity. 

8 Op. cit., Serm. I. 



220 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

2. Selfhood in Strength 

As the transmutation of mind and world witnessed 
the development of a constructive solipsism, according 
to which the self, instead of serving the general purposes 
of cosmic knowledge, sought a victorious view of its 
own independent being, so the moralic change from the 
self to society was to witness the deduction of a polem- 
ical egoism, whose definite form is comparable to the 
Satanism of the nineteenth century. With the elabo- 
ration of the intellect in the form of rational rights and 
rational religion, there was developed a suspicion that 
the understanding was not sufficient to the full needs 
of human life, whence came the emancipation of the 
irrational will. This irrationalism, as we must style it, 
was taken up by Milton in the seventeenth, by William 
Blake in the eighteenth century. In its definite literary 
form, the individualistic irrationalism of these poets can 
hardly be distinguished from the diabolism of Baude- 
laire and Nietzsche; but, since the thought of the En- 
lightenment was so thoroughly pledged to the moralic 
and the rationalistic, Milton was admired for qualities 
other than his Satanism, while Blake, except so far as 
his work as an engraver was concerned, was all but 
neglected. When, to-day, individualism is forced to 
observe the manner in which the self-active ego attempts 
to emancipate itself from the confines of the socializing, 
naturalizing intellect, it cannot justly overlook the qual- 
ities of strength as these appear in the Blake and Milton. 

The theological principles upon which Paradise Lost 
was founded were such as to make the diabolical neces- 
sary to the divine, while it further exalts human dis- 
obedience as a factor in the progress of humanity. 
Banished from Heaven to reign in Hell, Satan abandons 
his attack upon the celestial world, but only as he is 
inspired by the hope of gaining supremacy over a third 
order of existence, the created world, where mankind 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 2 2I 

dwells. Milton begins his glorification of Satanism 
when he makes the Deity admit the success of Satan 
in perverting the human will; and he further advances 
the cause of Satan by suggesting that, in the mind of 
God who has a strange admiration for Satanism, passive 
obedience is of no value in comparison with that free 
use of intellect and will, which, with both man and Satan, 
was to lead to such vicious consequences; active dis- 
obedience, then, is preferable to obedience. 7 As for the 
Miltonesque Satan, the humanism and modernism of 
this seventeenth century hero appear when self-skep- 
ticism and bad conscience inflict themselves upon him 
who has Hell within him, while the escape from such 
compunction and sense of weakness is made possible 
only by such a nihilistic act as turns the moralic into 
the immoralism of the famous Satanic maxim, Evil 
be thou my good ! 8 Nothing in Stendhal, Baudelaire, 
Nietzsche, or Wilde is superior to this. 

The superiority of Satanism as an ideal for human- 
ity appears when the angelic Raphael attempts to cast 
celestial dust in Adam's eyes when the latter desires 
information concerning the astronomical features of the 
newly created world. However natural it may be to 
inquire concerning the nature of the universe, argues 
Raphael, obedience is better than knowledge, so that 
Adam would better confine his curiosity to those things 
which concern his own being in its lowliness. 9 Indeed, 
Raphael seems to have anticipated somewhat of the 
Humanism of an English Oxford and an American 
Cambridge of to-day, since he seeks to base all knowl- 
edge upon the utilitarian and hedonic ; at the same 
time, his moralism bids him warn Adam lest passion 
carry him astray. 10 The extra-intellectual wisdom of 
Satan, who seems quite Dionysian in his character, 
appears in the fact that he, like Raphael, appeals to 

* Paradise Lost, Bk. III. 8 lb., Bk. IV. » lb., Bk. VIII. " lb. 



222 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the brain with its innate desire for knowledge. Milton 
makes his hero all but real and humanistic when he 
attributes to him a peculiarity amoristic sensibility when 
he beholds Eve, whose beauty has the power to abstract 
him from his innate badness, and render him for the 
time " stupidly good." 1X 

In the account of the temptation, Milton has a fine 
opportunity to anticipate Strindberg by indulging in an 
oblique attack upon feminism. In her desire to go forth 
alone in tending the garden, we have about the earliest 
attempt on the part of literature to represent the revolt 
of woman; trusting in the innocence which to Satan is 
less formidable than the " high intellectual " of Adam, 
it is Eve separate who introduces the fall of mankind. 12 
After the manner of the modern immoralist, Milton 
leads his Satan so to minimize sin as to instill into 
Eve's mind such ideals as are found in the hearts of 
the immoralist es of the Decadence. When Eve insists 
upon being guided by the rationalism of the Enlighten- 
ment, Satan suggests that sin is but a " petty trespass," 
while disobedience suggests " dauntless virtue." 13 If 
earth felt the wound of this feminist sin, it was with 
" blithe countenance " that Eve related how she had 
eaten of the " fallacious fruit." In expatiating upon 
the entrance of sin into the world, which he does with- 
out sign of regret, Milton was content to place evil 
somewhere near the good, while, without wholly obliter- 
ating the boundary line between the two, he tends to 
blur the immortal distinction, and thus rises to a position 
not much inferior to that Nietzschean height which is 
" beyond good and evil." 

As the superman of the nineteenth century was antici- 
pated by Milton in his Satan, so the current class- 
distinction between the superior and inferior, with their 
respective " master-morality " and " slave-morality," 

" Paradise Lost, Bk. IX. u lb. 13 lb. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 223 

was made by Mandeville, in the Fable of the Bees, 
1723. With Mandeville, this distinction was not made 
in a manner quite comparable to the morale of Nietzsche, 
in The Genealogy of Morals; at the same time, one 
cannot believe that Mandeville was possessed of that 
moral sincerity which cannot be overlooked in Nietzsche, 
even when one fails to sympathize with his particular 
conception of goodness. With Mandeville, the distinc- 
tion between " low-minded people " and " high-spirited 
creatures " was not made by either class concerned, but 
by a third order of men, the wise men and law-givers, 
who found it expedient to arrange mankind into such 
contrasted groups. In this manner, the superior men, 
in distinction from the master-moralists of Nietzsche, 
were the men of self-denial and public-spiritedness while 
the inferior ones were the selfish ones, who preferred 
voluptuousness to self-restraint. When, however, Man- 
deville attempted to show how " the savage man was 
(or at least might have been) broke," he suggested that 
the first principles of morality were broached by skilful 
politicians, who exalted the nobility of the superior men; 
thus, those actions which were esteemed useful were 
called by the name of virtue, the injurious ones were 
styled "vice." 14 

In the elaboration of the doctrine, selfhood through 
strength, no thinker of the Enlightenment, and perhaps 
no individualist of the nineteenth century, was superior 
to William Blake. In paying his respects to the author 
of Paradise Lost, Blake said, " The reason Milton wrote 
in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at 
liberty when of devils and hell, is because he was a true 
poet, and of the devil's party without knowing it." 15 
Fragmentary and paradoxical as are the utterances of 
Blake, they can be understood in the age of Nietzsche, 
and that so thoroughly that the continued reading of 

14 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 2nd ed., 1723, Ch. I. 

15 Prophetic Books, Voice of the Devil. 



224 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Nietzsche becomes unnecessary. Blake was the first to 
effect the " transvaluation of all values "; that is, Blake 
saw his way clear to effect the transposition of " good " 
and " evil." From the traditional point of view, 
" good " was regarded as that which is rational and 
passive, " evil " active and energistic ; in Blake's mind, 
the denotation should so be reversed that irrational 
energy should constitute the new good, while passive 
reason should be styled bad. In a more definite manner, 
Blake would relegate the new good to the body, while 
the new bad should be regarded as having its seat in 
reason, a conception as antithetic to the ideals of the 
Enlightenment as one could possibly imagine. 

Having made his transmutation of good and bad, 
Blake proceeds to bestow certain characteristics upon 
the new goodness of strength, which he likens to the 
" pride of the peacock," the " lust of the goat," the 
" wrath of the lion," and the " nakedness of woman." 
In this spirit, Blake devised certain maxims of the new 
morale, such as, " The tigers of wrath are wiser than 
the horses of instruction," and " One law for the lion 
and the ox is oppression," while his thought everywhere 
upholds " energy " and " excess." 18 While Blake's 
prose writings lay more stress upon the idea of strength 
than upon that of selfhood, his poems do not fail to 
make mention of the latter, whence he speaks of, " My 
selfhood, Satan armed in gold," 17 while his highly 
mystical poem The Mental Traveller seems to indicate 
the various phases of the struggle between the self and 
society. While he indulges in the mysticism and sen- 
sualism peculiar to the Decadence of the nineteenth 
century, Blake's chief emphasis was laid upon the prin- 
ciple of strength, in which lies apparently the only 
explanation and justification of his frank immoralism. 

19 Prophetic Books, Proverbs of Hell. 
17 Jerusalem. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 225 

II. THE PRACTICAL SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 

The naturalization of mankind was brought about by 
modern physics and biology, according to which the 
earth was adjusted to the universe with its single system 
of natural laws, while man was then relegated to earth 
according to a single principle of physico-social evolu- 
tion. There is no longer a privileged planet in the 
universe, no longer a privileged person upon the planet; 
all life has become scientific and social. For a while, 
the modern man asserted an individualism in the solips- 
ism and egoism of the Enlightenment; here it was 
asserted that, since all perception and conception come 
from the mind, the mind is thus supreme; there, since 
all action springs from the will, the active individual 
is in control of the social situation. If man will have 
a purely physical world, it is only because his mind 
so dictates; if he will have a social order, it is simply 
because he consents to the " social contract." Now, 
with the naturalization and socialization of life, the 
powers of thinking and doing have been taken from 
man, who henceforth must say, " I do not think, but 
thought goes on within my brain; I do not will, but 
work streams through my hand." If individualism did 
not actually feel the implications of positivism, it did 
not fail to place the ego of to-day in a position where 
he may take a stand against the naturalizing and social- 
izing influences of human life; unfortunately, this stand 
was a severe one; it involved the irrationalistic in its 
anti-scientism, the immoralistic in its anti-social attitude. 
If the individual refuses to be subsumed under the 
premises, it is difficult to see how he can be forced 
to the scientifico-social conclusion; the only unhappy 
feature about the individualist's attitude is its apparent 
impossibility. 

Unless contemporary thought is brought to the full 
realization of all that is included in the innocent word 



226 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

" social," it will not be likely to give credence to the 
rash ideals of decadent individualism : in the days of 
Baudelaire, these ideals were far from plausible; with 
Nietzsche, who has been no less bitter, the case is other- 
wise, for Nietzsche was in a position to feel the force 
of the oppressive social ideal. In themselves, decadence, 
pessimism, and skepticism cannot command approval; 
but, as replies to sociality, they are not impossible con- 
ceptions of the worth and truth of a human life which 
persists in self-assertion. Before the advance of the 
social ideal, both the intellect and the will soon suc- 
cumbed; man thus accepted the fact that his life, his 
work, were altogether social. 

i. The; Socialization of Work 

The socialization of work, with its practical corol- 
laries for life, is one of the most vivid ideas in the 
history of modern industrialism. Thus arose a practical 
synthesis of the issues of life in response to which wills 
that had once worked in independence now began to 
intertwine so that all sense of individuating impulse has 
long since passed away. In the treatment of this prob- 
lem by the political Socialist, the socialization of work 
comes in for approval and disapproval at the same time. 
Socialism bows before the necessity of socialized indus- 
try, and confines its criticism of the tendency to pointing 
out that, where labor is socially expended, the rewards 
for that labor are not socially, but individualistically 
distributed. It is not in the social production, but in 
the non-social distribution, of wealth that the difficulty 
arises. At the same time, when Socialism carries on 
its criticism of the existing conditions and present-day 
methods of capital, it seems to find it necessary to criti- 
cize individualism. But, in the case of the latter ques- 
tion, what is meant by " individualism " ? Who is the 
" individual " ? 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 227 

In order to save individualism from Socialism, if 
indeed this can be done, it is well to make a distinction 
between a doctrine of individualism according to which 
a man is what he has, and a different formulation of 
the principle of personal life in the world, according to 
which a man is what he is ; one is the " individual " of 
commerce, the other the individual of culture. Now, 
while Socialism is of course opposed to the individual 
of commerce, it does not follow that it is opposed to 
the individual of culture. " You must confess," says 
The Communist Manifesto, " that by ' individual ' you 
mean no other person than the Bourgeois, than the 
middle-class owner of property. This person must in- 
deed be swept out of the way, and made impossible. 
Communism deprives no man of the power to appro- 
priate the products of society; all that it does is to 
deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of 
others by means of such appropriation." 18 Socialism, 
which seems to interpret the " products of society " as 
though they included both material and spiritual goods, 
further declares itself in favor of culture. " Just as 
to the Bourgeois, the disappearance of class-property is 
the disappearance of production itself, so the disappear- 
ance of class-culture is to him the disappearance of all 
culture." 19 

Socialism thus fails to present antagonism to an indi- 
vidualism which seeks selfhood in culture; nevertheless, 
Socialism accepts the scientific socialization of life with 
a readiness which with individualism is not forthcoming. 
Can man be himself in work when that work is from 
now on ever destined to be a socialized one? If he 
relinquish his sense of selfhood in his labor, can he 
retrieve it when he receives the reward of that labor? 
Is the essential principle in selfhood the expression of 
character by means of action, or the realization of char- 

u Op. cit., Authorized tr., 37-38. ^ lb., 38. 

15 



228 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

acter from the objective results of that action? In indi- 
vidualism, one finds a dual protest; if man comes not 
into his own after he has labored, he goes not forth into 
his own when he works. If socialized labor is the last 
word of human work, individualism must take the stand 
that, as a means of self-realization, work must be given 
up, even when physical existence will ever depend upon 
human toil. Life may be wrong, although that is not 
likely to be the case; individualism can do nothing else 
than assert that man must devise some way of being 
himself in the midst of his work, or else free himself 
from that work. To appreciate such a paradox, one 
must come to an understanding with the situation in 
which work has become so socialized that individual 
initiative and personal effort have been lost. 

The outer socialization of the individual is expressed 
directly in mechanized industry; when the worker lays 
hold of the machine, the machine lays hold of him. The 
outcome of the duel is the victory of the machine, not 
of the man. To the individualist, who has been taught, 
who has taught himself, to believe that selfhood is found 
in such spiritual goods as truth, worth, and beauty, the 
situation presented by industrial activity is hopeless, for 
there the life-content is nothing but labor, from which 
the beautiful, the worthy, and the truthful have long 
since fled. When, therefore, Socialism protests that the 
worker has no property, no tools, the individualist 
protests that the worker has no culture, no character. 
Knowledge of his work and fidelity to work he may 
still possess; but such knowledge and such character, 
however useful in an age of industrialism, are not true 
in the eyes of individualism. When one considers the 
worker, one feels that sympathism should force the 
world to give him material goods to the very full of 
food, clothing, and shelter; but when one looks again, 
one cannot refrain from another kind of sympathism 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 229 

which insists that the laborer be allowed to have ideas 
and motives of his own. 

As a result of the industrial conditions, men have 
been herded from without and oppressed from within. 
To look back from the omnipotent socialization of 
working humanity, from which all thinking humanism 
has departed, to the ethical systems which considered 
life as inherently individual, is to wonder how mankind 
could have been so blind to his own condition in the 
world. Then, when ethical thought was ignorant of the 
social idea, all possible ethical effort was expended in 
the direction of persuading the " isolated " individual 
to come into the social order; the advantages of the 
" social contract," the duty of benevolence, the beauties 
of " altruism " were emphasized in the endeavor to 
induce the sheep to flock, the bees to swarm. As late 
as the utilitarianism of Sidgwick, this plea for social- 
ization was continued. But what is the actual condition 
of man but a crowded one, what is the condition of his 
mind but a socially conscious one, what the impulse of 
his will but an outward-going effort which causes him 
to give? In explanation of the ethics of "altruism," 
it may be pointed out that, since the industrial conditions 
had not yet been sufficiently advanced to produce the 
complete socialization of contemporary thought, the 
moralist may be excused for his error when he insisted 
that the individual do that which he must do, while it 
may further be suggested that the ethical thinker of the 
old order was seeking to enjoin a more genuine altruism 
in accordance with which man was asked to give cheer- 
fully of that which he did indeed seem to possess. 

With the drab truth of industrialism before our eyes, 
we realize that the call to altruism is a mockery, just as 
we must suspect that those who still assume the altruistic 
ideal, in the light of which they exhort the individual to 
engage in social service, do so with a purpose; these 



230 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



social " altruists," who insist upon the worth and truth 
of otherness, are apparently trying to cast a glory over 
the melancholy situation, as if they would persuade man 
that what he must do is that which he ought to do. 
With the change from relative isolation, which ever 
seemed threatened with an egoism due to the tendency 
on the part of the individual to rejoice in the privacy 
of his interior life, to almost complete socialization, 
altruism assumes a selfish form, while egoism as a doc- 
trine seems to be better calculated to help the other, to 
help him be himself. The problem of life, then, instead 
of involving a means of placing the self in the social 
order, consists in finding a way of escape for that indi- 
vidual. 

The outer socialization of life through work has had 
the effect of tearing man's will from him; when work 
was manual, the fatality of labor was not felt, but when 
work became the operation of machinery, the world- 
work of the individual came to an end. As the natural- 
ization of man involved an interpretation of life in terms 
of natural facts, so the socialization of man has been 
due to the application of natural forces to the work man 
had previously sought to perform as his own work. 
Physical science made necessary a new interpretation of 
man's mind; the same physical science, as applied to 
steam and electricity, gives a new complexion to man's 
will. Pure psychology once confronted the question 
whether man is an automaton; applied psychology finds 
the man of industry assuming the role of the automaton 
which earlier thought had sought through speculation to 
deny. Industry has made man automatic, for the worker 
must imitate his machine; industry has made man de- 
pendent upon others, since he can work in co-operation 
only. This industrial organization of life has made for 
the enhancement of the product, not for the enhance- 
ment of the personal producer. Man cannot stand alone 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



231 



in noble isolation; he must work in connection with the 
physically organized machines and socially organized 
laborers; the physical and the social have thus become 
the mill-stones of modern industry. Just as there has 
come from physico-social organization a great economic 
good, so the outcome of the affair may bring about an 
equally great ethical good; but, at the present time, it 
must be seen that the economic benefit has far out- 
stripped the ethical benefit, the naturalistic has over- 
awed the humanistic. Meanwhile, the claims of indi- 
vidualism, to the effect that man should have his own 
life and do his own work, are to be neglected only at 
great spiritual peril. Better assume the paradoxical 
idea that there should be no work, than conclude that 
there should be no humanity. But it may appear that 
human life has about it such a degree of truth and 
worth that the individual may find it possible to say, 
"I am," "I do." 

Just as industrialism holds out to man the supposed 
advantages of physical and social work, so it employs 
its moralizing powers to render man contented and 
faithful. The socialization of life thus ends in such a 
bay as the " ethics of industrialism," as this crowns 
Spencer's system of Synthetic Philosophy. The glories 
of the ancient military regime pass away leaving the 
individual unarmed against his industrial foe. Where, 
under the old system, there was a militaristic " code 
of enmity," industrialism comes in with the " code of 
amity." 20 But is industrialism any less cruel than was 
militarianism ? Then, men were forced to fight; now 
they are forced to work. Is there sufficient humanistic 
character in the code of industrialism? It is true that 
industrialism has made, as it were, a great world of 
humanity, if we may accept the inter-dependence of 
individual and individual, of race and race, as equiva- 

20 Data of Ethics, Ch. VIII. 



232 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



lent to that humanistic order; it is true also that indus- 
trialism has seemingly created a world of work, if we 
may assume that the proportions and character of such 
a world are to be found in economic activity. But have 
the worth and truth of life been conserved in this social 
synthesis ? 

The actual effects of industrialism may be appreciated 
when one remembers what conservative Capitalism has 
had to offer in the way of a proposed Socialism. The 
critic of Socialism has found it necessary to point out 
that the socialization of both the production and the 
distribution of wealth would result in a condition of 
mankind where individuality would be lost, individual 
initiative destroyed, private property abolished, the 
worker living in barracks. It may be that Socialism, 
which proposes to build upon the ruins of Capitalism, 
would indeed involve such a distressing condition of 
human affairs; if so, Socialism would have to meet the 
opposition of the individual. But, in contemplating the 
actual condition of the socialized man of the day, do 
we not find that our industrial life has already lodged 
us in some such condition? Viewed from the stand- 
point of the living and life-loving individual, industrial- 
ism seems so to have socialized life that private exist- 
ence has become well nigh impossible. 

The removal of the individual has accompanied the 
progress of socialized work, so that it is only in the 
extreme form of aesthetic personality that the ego may 
still be found. The individual of industrialism, basing 
his claim to selfhood upon his possessions, is in no sense 
the human individual as such. When, further, it is 
suggested that the coming of Socialism will mark the 
departure of the family, it must not be forgotten that, 
in large measure, the family-idea has succumbed to the 
influence of industrialism. Socialism might indeed com- 
plete the work of industrialism and thus disestablish the 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



233 



family as such, but the actual and probably unconscious 
abolition of the family has already begun. Human 
beings do not dwell in barracks, but the tenements of 
the laboring class are not many removes from this con- 
dition of things. The institution of private property 
has not been legally abolished, but in the actual con- 
dition of things, wherein a small minority are in pos- 
session of a large majority of material goods, the 
property-idea has become nominal. If one fears that 
individual initiative would pass with the coming of a 
completely, instead of a partially, socialized life, he must 
not overlook the fact that, where socialized work with 
machinery is the method of production, the individual 
initiative has largely lapsed. Under the auspices of 
industrialism, the individualistic " I am," " I will," have 
been neglected. 

The industrial ideal which had its origin in the social- 
ization of work, might perhaps represent a view of life 
which should prevail because of its sheer force; but to 
accept it as a fact, as many may choose to do, is not to 
accept it as interpretation of human existence and 
human character in the world. For those who cling 
to the ideal of an interior, self-directed life for mankind, 
and who can see no way out of the industrial situation, 
the most likely course is that of pessimism. Indeed, the 
decadent skepticism and pessimism which are soon to be 
examined seem to have this very motive as their source ; 
with no place for the individual in the social order, such 
anti-social cynicism has been no uncommon attitude on 
the part of the aesthetic individualist. At the same time, 
individualism has to thank social industrialism for the 
way in which it has emphasized and objectified the 
inherent sociality of our contemporary culture; at last 
we observe most clearly how, in the actual exterior- 
ization of life, the theory of life as social may assume 
a most definite outline. No longer need we puzzle over 



234 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



utilitarian adjustments of the individual to society, since 
the individual is firmly embedded in that society, as a 
" stone among stones " ; no longer need we strive with 
utilitarianism as it seeks to show how man passed from 
the purely hedonic within to the moralic without, in the 
conscious deduction of " common-sense morality." We 
see now that man is social, that man is moral, for it has 
been the fate of life to socialize and moralize him. In 
place of the utilitarian " demonstration " of the altru- 
istic nature of man, we are confronted by an objective, 
direct altruism in the form of complete sociality. In 
place of the derivative moralism, due to the forgotten 
idealization of utilities, we see man rendered moralic 
by means of convention. Thus, it is no longer possible 
to proceed from the naive individual, and then seek to 
derive sociality and morality; for the social and the 
conventional seize his consciousness before he has had 
the opportunity to say, " I am," or " I will." 

2. The Socialization of Morauty 

The foregoing discussion of The Socialization of Life 
was carried on for the purpose of showing that the social 
principle, instead of representing an ideal toward which 
the sympathistic should strive, is the actual situation 
which confronts every one who thinks he has a place 
in the world, a special need of existence. Thus, we 
hope to see most clearly that, having passed from the 
relativistic and utilitarian ideal of life to the actual 
condition of sociality and industry, we need no longer 
have anxiety for the welfare of the altruistic and mor- 
alistic ideals which the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies sought so earnestly, and so blindly, to establish. 
Utilitarianism has passed into history, and its history 
is one which we can now read with open eyes. One 
may be able to understand how Hobbes could assume 
egoism and relativism, and then seek to show how the 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 235 

social and moral attitude was brought about by means 
of contract; but one cannot so easily comprehend why 
Mill should have sought to prove the altruistic and the 
moralistic, when Comte had shown that these things 
were among the last to stand in need of demonstration. 
Still more surprising was the attempt of Sidgwick to 
graft the social and moral upon a utilitarian system so 
loath to receive it. At last we realize that human life 
is a socialized, legalized affair, so that we need spend 
no time in search of proofs which should show that 
man is thus social and conventional. 

(1) The Social Source of Morality 

The " proof " of altruism, which exhausted all the 
resources of the utilitarian, is now seen to be worthless 
as a conclusion, since the major premise, Man seeks his 
own happiness, has been seen to be false. Perhaps the 
blindness of the utilitarian, who sought to show that the 
social was useful to the individual, would not have been 
suffered had not the utilitarian been bent upon working 
out his theory of life upon purely hedonic grounds. 
With the static conception of nature, and the concomi- 
tant idea that the work of the world was a finished one, 
it was quite natural that the moralist of the Enlighten- 
ment should regard the pursuit of pleasure and the 
avoidance of pain as the sole motives of the human 
will ; but, with the dynamic view of the natural and 
social worlds, ethics was called upon to take into account 
the fact that the first demand in life is life itself, exist- 
ence rather than the enjoyment of existence. The work 
of the social order must be done, the affairs of society 
be arranged, so that to premise the greatest happiness 
of the greatest number is to overlook the truth that the 
individuals who make up society must first assure them- 
selves of existence. Again, so far as the individual 
himself is concerned, it is no longer possible to apply 



236 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the hedonic ideal to one who, finding no selfhood in 
mere self-love, has a finer and more serious task in his 
effort to be himself and express himself. What social 
thinker of the nineteenth century treated society after 
the manner of the " greatest happiness " theory? What 
individualist was content to express the meaning of self- 
hood after the manner of seventeenth-century " selfish- 
ness " ? Apart from any hedonic considerations, men 
have been found to be living together in a manner so 
unified that only the analogy of the organism seems 
capable of representing this social solidarity. In the 
same manner, individualism has deduced such character- 
istic qualities of selfhood that no traditional conception 
of self-love can longer hope to interpret the sense of 
life as this is felt within. 

Society, itself organic to man as man, has been 
brought together so perfectly, so compactly, by social- 
ized work that all attempts to " prove " the social are 
useless and misleading. The key to the difficulty seems 
to be found in the false anthropology of Hobbes, in 
accordance with which the non-social, non-moral ego 
was the point of departure. Had the age been able to 
ignore this error, the false impression would not have 
been given. As it was, Grotius had made the social 
nature of man the starting-point of his system, while 
the earliest reply to Hobbes, that of Cumberland in his 
De Legibus Naturae, 1672, had not failed to seek and 
to find evidences of man's social nature. 21 Further- 
more, Shaftesbury, in his Inquiry concerning Virtue, 
1699, ignored the Hobbist ego, and relegated man to a 
complete " system," which included the human, the 
animal, and the vegetable, 22 while his psychology of 
man was such as to make room for " natural public 
affections, natural private affections, unnatural affec- 
tions." 23 With Hume, it was sympathy from which 

*» Op. cit., cap. 2. a Op. cit., II, 2, 1. a lb., I, 2, 3. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 237 

morality was to be derived, the source of the social and 
the moral. 24 Why these forerunners of Comte were 
not esteemed authentic is one of the mysteries of the 
English Enlightenment. At the same time, it was the 
detained thought of the nineteenth century, the associ- 
ational utilitarianism of Mill, which placed upon our 
ethics the unnecessary burden of proving the obvious, 
the social nature of mankind. One may place the dog- 
matic egoism of Hobbes side by side with the utilitarian 
" demonstration," and one will find that the original 
statement is as false as the final solution. It must not 
be overlooked that Mill viewed Comte's morals with 
" the strongest objections," before he tried to show that, 
since each desires his own happiness, the general hap- 
piness is desirable. 25 Nevertheless, we cannot fail to 
conclude in favor of Comte. 

The whole machinery of relativism, associationism, 
utilitarianism, breaks down from its own weight. Comte's 
conception of the innate sociality of man depends upon 
an unprejudiced view of man as man. In speaking of 
the social state, as viewed by utilitarians and positivists, 
Comte says, " It is evident that the social state would 
never have existed, if its rise had depended upon the 
conviction of its individual utility, because the benefit 
could never have been anticipated by individuals of any 
degree of ability, but could only manifest itself after 
the social evolution had proceeded up to a certain point. 
There are even sophists who at this day deny the utility, 
without being pronounced mad; and the spontaneous 
sociability of human nature, independent of all personal 
calculation, and often in opposition to the strongest 
individual interests, is admitted, as of course, by those 
who have paid no great attention to the true biological 
theory of our intellectual and moral nature." 26 Comte 

24 Treatise of Human Nature, III, III, I. 

25 Utilitarianism, Chs. Ill, IV. 

20 Positive Philosophy, tr. Martineau, Bk. VI, Ch. V, 49S-499. 



238 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is frank, not only in his avowal of the perfect sociality 
of man's moral life, but in his rejection of every sug- 
gestion of the ego; in this attitude, he takes a stand 
which is perfectly consistent from the standpoint of 
systematic philosophy. What right had the materialism 
of Hobbes or the associationism of Mill to make the 
egoistic assumption ? Why should it be thought that 
the removal of all spirituality from the world should 
result in regarding man as self-centered and self-seeking, 
except that traditional thought felt that both the materi- 
alistic and egoistic hypotheses were equally ignoble? 
In truth, that which removes the spiritual from the 
world removes the self with it, so that modern egoism 
failed to find any just foundation until Butler placed 
" reasonable self-love " upon the basis of the complete 
rationality of the world as a whole. 

As our examination of the Enlightenment's " ego- 
ism " sought to show, individualism finds no ground 
for its doctrine in the hedonistic ethics of that period, 
finds scarcely a trace of it in the egoism of the Car- 
tesian school. Only in the case of the Satanism and 
solipsism of the Enlightenment does individualism see 
any suggestion of that sense of selfhood and self- 
expression which it regards as the foci of the individ- 
ualistic doctrine. In the instance of Comte, the candid 
rejection of the self is of great value in clearing up 
the situation; from Comte's attitude, we learn how 
impossible it is for the scientific view of the world to 
entertain the idea of the ego as such, so that the social 
source of morality results in being the sole hope of the 
positivistic thinker. When, therefore, Comte premised 
the absolute spontaneity of the social principle, and thus 
forbade any egoistic calculations concerning the per- 
sonal advantages of the social state, he had prepared 
the way for the socialization of life by the scientific 
removal of the human self. Thus, the conclusion to 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



239 



his naturalism, as represented by the last chapter of the 
last science to be examined, consists in the negation of 
the " I." Having followed the course of nature through 
the mathematical, astronomical, physical, chemical, and 
biological, he brings his investigation to a close by sub- 
stituting the brain for the " I." 27 From the negations 
of biology, he is ready to pass to the affirmations of 
" social physics." 

With the feeling that psychology has too thoroughly 
intellectualized man, even though his own system of 
positivism really deepens this prejudice, Comte uses his 
favorite idea of " spontaneity " to evince the sponta- 
neous activism of the human brain, whereby he is able 
to lower man from the rational to the biological order. 
This makes it possible for him to repudiate the theo- 
logical " soul " and the philosophical " I." From the 
positivist point of view, human nature, far from being 
a unified affair, is essentially multiple, since its powers 
tend to urge it in different directions, whence the preser- 
vation of equilibrium becomes unusually difficult. " Thus 
the famous theory of the I is essentially without a 
scientific object, since it is destined to represent a purely 
fictitious state." 28 This synthetic unity, as philosophy 
has sought to style the self, is, with Comte, more like 
a synergy, possessed by all forms of animal life. From 
the synergistic point of view, Comte is in a position to 
assert that, instead of man's being the sole possessor of 
the I, selfhood belongs to animals alike, while in some 
cases man has less sense of selfhood than that enjoyed 
by other vertebrates. " No doubt a cat, or any other 
vertebrated animal, without knowing how to say, ' I,' 
is not in the habit of taking itself for another. More- 
over, it is probable that among the superior animals the 
sense of personality is still more marked than in man, 
on account of their more isolated life." 29 

* Positive Philosophy, Bk. V, Ch. VI. a lb., 385. 2 » lb. 



240 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



In this attempt to eliminate the individual, Comte in 
his absurdities is not guilty of inconsistency; given the 
naturalistic premises, the conclusion that man has no 
" I am " is sure to follow, although one cannot see how 
the principle of isolation could have the effect of pro- 
ducing in the lower animal a higher sense of selfhood 
than is found in man. Comte's theory of the " self," 
while appearing to confine itself to mere consciousness, 
or cerebral activity, presses on to the realm of human- 
ism, where the positivist is called upon to explain the 
culture of the self by means of education and legisla- 
tion, the influence of which he feels unable to deny. 
Comte makes his escape from this predicament in a 
manner most suggestive to the individualist; positivism 
does regard law as making possible man's reasonable 
liberty, education as providing for improvement; but it 
denies the rights of an ideology which seeks to convert 
" all men into so many Socrates,' Homers, or Archim- 
edes'." 30 Now it is the converting of raw humanity 
into so many egos of the type mentioned which forms 
the individualistic idea; meanwhile, it is incumbent upon 
positivism to show how such egos have made their 
appearance in the world, where positivistic laws of 
being and action are supposed to be consecrated to the 
purely biological and social. 

The development of the positivistic method, as this 
appears in Spencer, shows how the evolutionary theory 
made it possible for the moralist to make use of a 
regressus and a progressus unknown to Comte. In 
pursuing, not merely the biological, but the full system 
of biological evolution, Spencer finds it possible to con- 
sider conduct as that which passes from purely physical 
motion to that which is perfect in its individualistico- 
social character. In the lowest view of conduct, we 
find the expression of the evolutionary law, whence 

30 Positive Philosophy, 390-391. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 241 

matter begins its passage from the homogeneous to the 
heterogeneous ; from the highest view-point, we gain a 
view of the " behaviour of the completely adapted man 
.in the completely evolved society." 31 Indeed, Spencer's 
" ultimate man," as one who has lived to see the passing 
of self-sacrifice, is not altogether unlike the individual- 
ist's ego, who has been known to be cruel and hard. 
Whether Spencer had the philosophic right to introduce 
such a self into his system is another question; and we 
can only feel that he has borrowed this ego from either 
the theological or metaphysical temple whose doors 
Comte was supposed to have closed. 

When individualism surveys the socialization of ethics, 
whereby all hedonism and utilitarianism were left 
stranded, it asks itself whether there may not be some- 
thing in the discarded idea of a human " aggregate " 
seeking its " greatest happiness " which may be of value 
in the individualistic view of life. It was the eighteenth- 
centuryism which, clinging to utilitarianism, was swept 
away by the advance of positivism; and, as an ideal of 
the Enlightenment, the happiness of the self cannot be 
regarded as sound. Yet, without making use of the 
impossible ideas of the political aggregate or the utili- 
tarian sense of happiness, individualism may register its 
protest against the bland ideal of the health of the social 
organism, inasmuch as that bovine ideal ignores the 
inner life of man, wherein the joy of living is such an 
important consideration. It seems now that the eudae- 
monistic ideal, which has been rejected by positivism, 
may become an integral part of individualism, and the 
history of individualism shows how important to the 
doctrine of selfhood this idea of personal felicity can be. 

Individualism, then, distinguishes itself from posi- 
tivism when individualism insists upon the self and the 
joy of existence: positivism has no place for the self; 

31 Data of Ethics, § 104. 



242 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

and, were it forced to admit the existence of the " I" 
it would have nothing eudaemonistic for it in the social 
state. This lack of individualism and lack of eudae- 
monism must be fully appreciated by those who would 
understand the strivings of the modern individualist ; 
and when these strivings appear vicious, one must again 
remember that individualism, in its conflict with posi- 
tivism, has been justified in resorting to the most ex- 
treme measures, aestheticism, immoralism, irreligion, in 
order to convince the world that the self exists, et ego 
in Arcadia. Individualism, when left to itself, may 
indeed advance to the irrational and vicious, to the 
decadence of aestheticism, the diabolism of an immoral- 
istic ideal; but better this exaggerated, uncontrolled ego 
than no ego at all, and it is at the elimination of the 
ego that scientifico-social thought has been aiming. It 
has been the fate of the human self to have been placed 
in the egoistic position, although it must be admitted 
that individualism was not slow to accept the office to 
which society had appointed it. One does not rashly 
withdraw from the world to assume an anti-social posi- 
tion; but, when continuance in the world means self- 
negation, the individualist takes the step outward. 

When science, having made its beginnings first with 
the physical and then with the biological, turned its 
attention toward the social ideal of human life, it placed 
idealistic people in a peculiar position. If these ideal- 
ists desired to inherit the inner life with its religious 
possibilities, they would be forced to adopt the extrava- 
gant egoism of the decadent school, wherein selfhood 
was not wholly distinguishable from the Satanism of 
Blake and Baudelaire; now, idealism was unwilling to 
pay such a price. On the other hand, did these spirit- 
ually minded ones feel that they must abide by the 
principles of Christian charity, they found themselves 
so situated that they must take the scientist as the Posi- 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



243 



tivist priest, and thus identify love and benevolence with 
the gregarious tendency observable alike in beasts and 
human beings. The strange synthesis of Christian and 
scientific ethics, in both of which the humanitarian is 
so influential, is easy to recognize, not so easy to explain. 
One might indeed expect science, which had been so 
rigorous in its treatment of the religious conception of 
the spiritual world, to have carried its warfare over into 
the practical also, and to have inaugurated as radical a 
conception of life as of the world. For some reason, 
science did nothing of the kind, but rather adopted a 
morale the fundamental principles of which are parallel 
to those of Christianity. As a result, the atheistic sci- 
entist of the nineteenth century found it possible to 
postulate an ethics which tended to place Darwin and 
Huxley by the side of their ecclesiastical opponents. 
In this atheism, there is a peculiar note of tenderness, 
a peculiar yearning for humanity, and one is not sure 
that science and religion are so mutually opposed; on 
the other hand, the atheism which saves the humani- 
tarian seems better to the average thinker than a Satan- 
ism which aspires to save the individual. 

(2) The Social Sanction of Morality 

The moral docility of science, which led Nietzsche 
to place both scientist and religionist in the same class 
of the poor in spirit, must not hide the fact that, even 
where scientific morality was not vicious, it was medi- 
ocre, inferior. At the same time, the scientific social- 
ization of morality was such as to weaken the force of 
the moral sanction, that is, among those who were pos- 
sessed of the " robust conscience " ; we shall not grieve 
over our social sins, reasoned these stout hearts, and 
compunction in the character of mere compassion shall 
not torment him who has resolved to " be hard." Where 
conscience is not so thoroughly explicable, it is not so 

16 



244 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



easy to repudiate it or to withstand its sting, so that 
the terrors of conscience have with Shakespeare a tragic 
influence which is lost to Ibsen. The modern protag- 
onist, whether an Ibsenesque Skule, in The Pretenders, 
or a Nora, in Doll's House, is confronted by no other 
conscience than the social conscience; and, if he or she 
be healthy of mind, the social sanction will be unable 
to overcome the egoistic impulse. As Beata, in Suder- 
mann's The Joy of Living, said, " It is not your con- 
science, but the conscience of the race." 32 In present- 
ing morality with the conscience of the race, science has 
been good and bad at once; science has assumed the 
cloak of righteousness, but has not been able to supply 
the living body of moral sanction. 

The case of conscience is so significant in the social- 
ization of the moral life that the reminiscence of it can 
be only instructive. In The Descent of Man, it found its 
most authoritative statement. Darwin placed himself in 
a position where he was able to read Adam Smith and 
Butler at the same time; imperious conscience at once 
assumed the form of a persistent instinct. This per- 
sistent instinct appears as sociability, in which we have 
an example of the way that nature cares for the species 
at the expense of the individual. Awakened in man, 
where the social instinct assumes the moralic form par 
excellence, this enduring instinct is not absent from 
other species : monkeys, for example, are found in the 
altruistic position of removing external parasites and 
other irritants from- the fur of those afflicted ; and the 
compassionate act is performed " conscientiously." 33 
The psychological principle at work in both animal and 
man is expressed by saying that the more enduring 
social instinct conquers the less persistent individualistic 
instinct. In the case of the human species, that which 
effects the change from the sub-moral to the moral is 

31 Op. tit., tr. Wharton, Act. IV. & Descent of Man, 1873, I, 72. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 245 

found in the superiority of intellect, in which latter 
memory and ideation are more highly developed. Hence, 
the beast or bird can be cruel, because memory fails to 
present to its mind the image of the young which the 
creature has neglected; but, with man, the idea of others 
is more persistent than the idea of self, hence the sub- 
mission to the principle of conscience. In Darwin's 
mind, the " bad man " is he who, wanting in sympathy, 
is not overcome with conscience after the anti-social 
deed has been done. 34 Now it is at this point that indi- 
vidualism has felt called upon to repudiate the scientific 
conscience; individualism arose instinctively as an anti- 
social, anti-scientific revolt, before the positivist formu- 
lation of the scientifico-social was in the saddle, ready 
to ride mankind. Polemical individualism may have 
been both irrationalistic and immoralistic, but it never 
sinned against the self. 

From conscience to duty, the path is plain; conscience 
and duty are but twin expressions of the total moral 
consciousness. The academic difference between the 
pair may be understood when one makes the simple 
distinction between the intellect and the will : conscience 
is the awareness of the moral fact; duty the affirmation 
of the good, the negation of the bad. Now the old 
" duty " was imposed rationally by the individual, who 
swung the yoke over his own shoulders ; the new 
" duty " has been placed upon the individual by society. 
The social duty thus assumes the form of responsibility, 
a sense aroused by the fact that, since man actually 
lives in society, man must assume the burdens of the 
social order. Even with the rigorous Kant, there was 
a suggestion of the social, when the Categorical Im- 
perative was thought to impose a maxim of conduct fit 
to become a universal law. Expressed in the social 
form, the Categorical Imperative bids the individual act 

31 Descent of Man, 1873, I, 88. 



246 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

with the weight of all mankind upon his shoulders; 
where the rational Imperative chastised with whips, the 
social Imperative chastises with scorpions. Individual- 
ism, which arose before the social morale was in power, 
was thus armed before its opponent appeared upon the 
field. 

It is in connection with the strictly moral that the 
conflict between the individual and society assumes its 
most interesting and most acute form; man is naturally 
susceptible to ethical influence, so that when the social 
argument passes on from the scientific attempt to ex- 
plain primitive conduct to the equally scientific attempt 
to dictate motives and emotions, it becomes difficult for 
the individualist to continue his conflict. At the same 
time, the history of individualism does not fail to reveal 
the fact that, having asserted the independence of the 
true and the good, the individual has found it possible to 
arm himself against the scientific law of the good. The 
tenderness of scientific ethics with its inordinate concern 
for the species has been met by the cruelty of aesthetic 
ethics, in which the inner life of the individual is the 
only imperative. Where the new ethics commands, 
" Be social," individualism continues to command, " Be 
thyself." At present, sociality seems to find no way of 
recognizing the sanctity of the individualistic impera- 
tive, nor does the individual find it in his heart to assent 
to the social sanction. Spencer thought to find a way 
out of the conflict by pointing to the coming of an 
Absolute Ethics, under the auspices of which the con- 
flicting claims of egoism and altruism would be mutually 
reconciled ; and Nietzsche sought to find a social place 
for the egoistic superman by prophesying the coming 
of a race of such individuals. But, if philosophy is 
sufficiently futuristic to solve the problems of present- 
day thought, it is none the less necessary for us to 
realize how deeply both the social and individual have 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 247 

entered the blood; more perfectly aware of the social, 
as this has objectified itself in institutional ethics, we 
are no less conscious of the individualistic, as this 
appears in the culture-consciousness of the day. 

In the career of modern ethics, the problems of source 
and sanction have been so confused and blended that it 
has not been until of late that the desired separation of 
the two has received adequate treatment, if indeed the 
present-day method may be called adequate. At first, 
the question of source was not raised for its own sake 
as a question of anthropology and psychology, but was 
pursued casually for the purpose of establishing a moral 
principle. This was the case with Hobbes, who sought 
to lay down the principles and enjoin the methods of 
relativism by showing, as he seemed to think, that mor- 
ality sprang up naturally from a non-moral source. The 
non-moral condition of mankind was felt to have been 
one of primitive egoism, so that the elaboration of a 
social conception of character made necessary that 
abrupt and artificial passage from nature to society 
which Hobbes celebrates in his theory of social con- 
tract. It was thus because he wished to evince the 
sanctity of the social that he attempted to show that 
man had actually made the transition from the egoistic 
to the social. The good became that which man had 
actually done. 

The opponents of Hobbes, especially those who, like 
Cudworth and Clarke, sought to overthrow his ethics of 
relativism, were as poorly equipped with anthropological 
data and methods as he had been; hence they were in 
no position to throw light upon the question, How did 
the moral life begin? The absolutism which set itself 
in defiance of the Hobbist relativism was strangely calm 
in the presence of that idea of self-love which Hobbes 
had made central to his own system. Cudworth and 
Clarke were absolutists, but not altruists; they felt no 



248 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

shock in the idea of egoism, for it was only the relativ- 
ism of virtue and vice which aroused them. But the 
assertion that virtue and vice are eternally in character 
and that the distinction between them is equally free 
from temporalistic taint, did little to fortify the ethical 
consciousness against the tide of social morality which 
had begun to rise. Hobbes may not have given a true 
account of the passage from mere pleasure-pain to sheer 
virtue-vice, but his absolutistic opponents had shot over 
the mark when they sought to relegate morality to eter- 
nity. The source of morality was still to be found. 

The Enlightenment was blind to history, and it was 
only as its rationalism passed away that the idea of 
progress became a category in the speculative mind. 
It is true that Vico's Scienza Nuova (1725) was pos- 
sessed of more penetration than the average work of 
that period; true also that Turgot's Les Pr ogres suc- 
cessifs de V esprit humain (1750) was not wanting in 
historical sense. But these works were not so influen- 
tial as the traditional documents of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, where the static ideals of rationalism obtained. 
The nineteenth century, however, was as thoroughly 
committed to time as the earlier had been consecrated 
to eternity; so that the question concerning the origin 
of morality has not wanted for psychological treatment, 
even when one might complain that the genetic interest 
had often been allowed to mask the moral ideal. Two 
attempts to disclose the source of " good " and " bad " 
have been made : the utilitarian, and the social evolu- 
tionary. The difference between these may be compre- 
hended by observing that, where the utilitarian did not 
proceed in the spirit of a sufficient anthropology, it had 
the advantage of concluding with some sort of an ex- 
planation of what it called " common-sense morality." 
On the other hand, the evolutionist has been more suc- 
cessful in securing a conception of the primitive mind, 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 249 

less successful, however, in conveying that to an age 
which still sees something intrinsic in morality. Mill 
thus advanced from utility to virtue; Spencer was able 
to advance from nothing more than one degree of inter- 
est to another, passing under the remote ideals of virtue 
and vice as such. 

It must not be forgotten that the Enlightenment was 
possessed of a dogmatism shared by both rigorist and 
hedonist; for, where a Cudworth would have nothing 
but virtue and vice at the poles of his moralic sphere, 
Bentham was equally opposed to the admission of any- 
thing but pleasure and pain, so that he sought to banish 
the moralic " ought " from the dictionary of ethics. 35 
On the hedonistic side, this was far from representing 
the attitude of Mill, who, while he suffered virtue to 
enter the moral court only after utility had demon- 
strated its right to be there, did not hesitate to accord 
to independent virtue a place by the side of utility itself. 
With Mill, then, virtue was viewed as secondary in 
origin, while it was esteemed as primary in point of 
ground. Mill premised a supreme utility, and then 
sought to admit the minor premise of virtue, by looking 
upon the latter as something outwardly moralic, but 
inwardly utilitarian : virtue is a past utility ; virtue is 
a forgotten utility. As one passes from the love of 
money for its purchasing power to the love of money 
for its own sake, so man passes from virtue as that 
which is useful to virtue which exists for its own sake. 
By association, then, virtue acquired a moralic character, 
the change from the utility to the virtue coming about 
by the oblivesence of the useful as motive. 36 In reply 
to this argument in favor of the utilitarian origin of 
morality, Nietzsche insisted that the utility of the orig- 
inal act cannot be conceived of as lapsing, while the 
forgetting of the utility would have been equally im- 

83 Deontology, 1834, 31-32. s« Utilitarianism, Ch. IV. 



250 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



possible. 37 Begin with the utilitarian, and you end with 
the utilitarian. 

The individualistic theory of moral progress, which 
Nietzsche upholds, seems to be of weight more upon 
the side of the ground of moral as superioristic, less 
upon the side of its origin as that which was peculiar 
to the aristocrat of primitive times. Nietzsche's argu- 
ment is almost altogether philological, while it does not 
fail to involve etymologies which seem scarcely plausi- 
ble. First, it is insisted that the ability to name things 
and the prerogative of defining belonged to the superior 
man rather than to the people. With the power of 
definition in the hands of the superior person, it is not 
hard to assume that the superior man would call " good " 
that which was peculiar and most precious to him as 
one of high spirit and superior social situation. " Bad " 
would stand for the attributes of inferior people who in 
being simple (schlicht) were likewise bad (schlecht). 
In particular, the lower races having usually been those 
of dark skin, it seemed possible to Nietzsche to establish 
a connection between bad (malus) and black (melas). 
Where Nietzsche could have continued these analogies 
and could thus have connected good (bonus) with fair 
(bonnie), he chose to interpret bonus as coming from 
duonus, in which is found the idea of the duelling man, 
the man of contention, the warrior. 3s The upshot of 
the Nietzschean contention is that morality was handed 
down from above as a privilege to be enjoyed by the 
common people, not thrust up from below as the rights 
of those who are inferior. 

In seeking to adjust one's self to such a difference 
of opinion, it is well to remember that, in considering 
the past, it is quite difficult to avoid using the present as 
the method of approach. In this manner, Mill attributes 
to the primitive man the same economic wisdom which, 

s1 Genealogy of Morals, tr. Hauseman, § 3. 3S Op. cit., § 5. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 25 1 

in modern times, was impressed upon man by the care- 
ful reasoning of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and likewise 
Mill himself. In the same fashion, Nietzsche seeks to 
account for the sentiments of the primitive individual 
by drawing an analogy between his mind and that of 
an aristocratic Pole like himself. Now, as a matter of 
fact, was the primitive man a Mill or a Nietzsche? 
We know of course that he was neither one nor the 
other, so that, if he was utilitarian, it was in his own 
way; if he was aristocratic, it was after the manner of 
his own character. If it be said that, whereas the aris- 
tocratic ideal by virtue of its very superiority was im- 
possible with the primitive man, while the very common- 
ness of utility would have fitted utility for assuming the 
position of moral principle, it may be questioned whether 
utility, however inferior it may be as an ideal, is such 
an easy idea for the mind to perfect. In addition to the 
economic theorists who have given a meaning to work 
and value, the present age has witnessed the rise of 
economic practitioners, who, in the capacity of " social 
engineers," are striving to get the maximum of value 
out of both world and work. Was the primitive man 
any more " efficient " than " ideal " ? 

If, as may well be the case, we are in ignorance con- 
cerning the ideas and motives of the man of nature, we 
are in no position to assert that the origin of morality 
then was as utilitarian as the outcome of it seems to be 
to-day. What the primitive man actually did is one 
thing; what he assumed to be doing is somewhat differ- 
ent. Conduct may be utilitarian where the sanction of 
conduct, as in the case of the Hebrew Law, may be 
ideal. Can we assert that the primitive man did only 
useful things when the man of perfected civilization 
is still annoyed to find that much of his effort is far 
removed from the efficiency so earnestly sought? In 
the midst of this doubt which we feel when we strive 



252 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



to explain primitive conduct in the light of the per- 
fections of an economic age like our own, we are con- 
fronted by the fact that out of the primitive conscious- 
ness there came the ideals of art and worship which 
have come down to us in such forms as, for example, 
the Rik Veda. Utility is there too; but the primitive 
man seems to have had a better knowledge of the sky 
than of the earth, and to have been devoted to his ideas 
in a manner unknown among the practical motives 
of his life. In those early days, when the forces of 
nature and the phenomena of mind had not been sub- 
jected to physics or psychology, the ideal was as likely 
a path as the real. 

III. THE INADEQUACY OF THE SOCIAL 

Social philosophy has been able to make headway in 
modern culture for the reason that modern thought and 
modern life, freed from the formalism of the classic 
world and emancipated from the restrictions of scholas- 
ticism, have seen fit to indulge the passion for the actual 
in the heterogeneity of detail. At the present hour, it 
would seem to be impossible to estimate the number of 
actual facts which have been brought to light by physical 
and social science. Both nature and humanity have been 
subjected to microscopic examination in the course of 
which the data of science have accumulated to a degree 
far beyond the power of the investigator to comprehend. 
New sciences have been created and the old so sub- 
divided that the new part is much greater than the old 
whole, whence nature assumes a form of infinite com- 
plexity. In the humanistic field, the past has been ex- 
tended far beyond the old limits of historicity; and, to 
all this new realm of anthropology, the old history has 
been done over in such a manner as to render the life 
of man on earth an affair of indescribable manifoldness. 
The effect of such a culture of the naturistic and the 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 253 

social has been to create the impression that scientism 
and sociality contain enough in the way of idea and 
ideal to satisfy the intellect and will of the individual. 
If the satisfaction of man's spiritual nature were wholly 
a question of quantity, then the extensiveness of modern 
culture would be more than sufficient for the needs of 
human life; but, where the needs of the human soul, 
as these expressed themselves in the past, were of such 
a character that the immediacies of nature and society 
did not forestall the enlightenment and furtherance of 
art, morality, and religion, these needs are such that no 
increase of the same kind of scientific knowledge is able 
to supply them. Thus, as individualism judges scientism 
to be insufficient, it must regard sociality as inadequate. 

1. Lack of Life-Contsnt in Sociality 

By its very nature, thinking is bound to be a formal 
proceeding on the part of the human mind. Where one 
busies himself with mathematics and logic, he does not 
fail to recognize the barren nature of the thinking which 
his work involves; but when he turns to the field of 
experience, he persuades himself that thinking has now 
acquired a new nature, far different in kind from that 
which it possessed when its work was avowedly abstract. 
But such is not the case : the content is there indeed ; 
but the method of handling is no freer from formalism 
than that which was operative in the less realistic realm. 
In themselves, the principles of science are as wanting 
in content as those of Aristotle's logic; and Spencer's 
definition of evolution, which he would apply alike to 
nature and society, is as abstract as the worst product 
of scholasticism. In the special field of social science, 
the propositions advanced in connection with such sub- 
jects as " man," " life," and " morality " are so far 
removed from the actual life-content of these subjects 
that no one can recognize in himself that which he 



254 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

reads upon the page of the sociological work, whence 
he imagines that the author must be speaking of some 
one else, or some other species of men. 

The formalism which makes sociality so inadequate 
appears at once in connection with that which social 
science calls, " the self." Such a punctual ego has no 
existence in human life, but is simply a factor, x or y, 
m or n, introduced into the calculation. In the realm 
of physical science, there is no lack of this punctual 
thinking, but here the abuse of the object in ques- 
tion can make no great difference to the thing; more- 
over, physical science is ever in a position to descend 
from the species in general to the specimen in par- 
ticular, from the law to an example of its obedience. 
With social science, however, the highly general prin- 
ciple is not shaped in such a manner that its broad lines 
are able to converge and meet in the special point indi- 
cated by the term " self," so that the self as such has 
never been the subject of social investigation. To this 
scruple exercised by those who fail to find human life 
in social science, it may be replied that social thought 
is interested in the species rather than in the individual; 
but even so the individual's participation in the whole 
should not cause him to forsake that which is most 
characteristic of his life-content. 

Social science has not been able to supply ethics with 
anything like a definition of the self, except where the 
social thinker has been allowed to make use of a negative 
method in the light of which he describes the self in 
social terms made privative. It must be admitted that 
the common method of subordination which makes logic 
appear so simple, is a method which social thinking must 
pursue with great difficulty. This fact is in the very 
nature of the case. Suppose that the logical problem 
consists in relating man to society or to humanity; 
although the issue in question would seem to be nothing 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 255 

more than the logic of subordination, the nature of the 
proposed problem is such as to forbid the free use of 
this formal method. To relate " dog " to " animality " 
is to subordinate the specimen to the species, an oper- 
ation which takes place in such a manner that the sub- 
sumed specimen, although it be still an animal, seems 
to enjoy a kind of existence in independence of the 
general notion. In the case of the attempted subordi- 
nation of " the individual " to " humanity " or to " soci- 
ety," there is, so to speak, no appreciable distance be- 
tween the species and the thing in particular. Indeed, 
the case in question is akin to that in geometry, where 
it is necessary to turn from the conceptual to the intu- 
itive in order to show the relation between the triangle 
in particular, which participates immediately in general 
space, and space as a universal to which the idea of 
triangle belongs. As a matter of fact, the idea of " be- 
longing " to a logically superior class, while it applies 
in the case of oak and tree, dog and animal, has little 
or no meaning in the instances of individual and human- 
ity, triangle and space. In a certain sense, spatiality is 
implicit in triangle, while humanity is equally implicit 
in individuality, since the application of spatiality and 
humanity is at once intensive and extensive. As a result 
of this unique situation, social science has not been able 
to supply the idea of selfhood with any characteristic 
content. 

To obviate the purely punctual treatment of the ego, 
philosophy is forced to avoid the common methods of 
subordination, and thus connect the individual with the 
species. In no generalization whatsoever does the uni- 
versal have any meaning apart from the particulars 
which belong to it, even when the scholastic spirit may 
seek to endow the universal with extra stability. But, 
with humanity and individual, the connection between 
general and particular is even less flexible, since there 



256 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is a sense in which the individual is humanity and hu- 
manity the individual. The aesthetic interpretation of 
humanity has been such as to afford an intense realiz- 
ation of this logical situation, even when art has not 
always been ready or able to reveal its secret. Art has 
proceeded upon the assumption that its intensive par- 
ticulars have the power to convey the significance of 
the general to which they might be attached. In this 
manner, the landscape becomes all nature, the statue 
humanity, the character mankind, the romance human 
life. No amount of social logic has been able to indi- 
cate the intimate union of the self and society, the indi- 
vidual and humanity, and that because social logic has 
not been able to see that the relation of the particular 
to the general, far from being conceptual, is more likely 
of an intuitive nature. 

The inadequacy of the social is one with the insuffi- 
ciency of the scientific; and, as we have witnessed how 
polemical individualism sought by an appeal to the in- 
ward sense of joy, worth, and truth to invest the scien- 
tific " self " with a content, we shall see presently how 
the same individual, finding no real life-place in the 
social order, will proceed to interpret his life as the 
place of those same joys, worths, and truths. There is 
a life-content to the individual's life; and, if this has 
not been indicated by sociality, it has not wanted for 
aesthetic expression. Indeed, the whole individualistic 
movement from Romanticism to Symbolism and Nat- 
uralism has been an attempt to supply the inner life of 
humanity with a meaning which analytical science has 
been unable to furnish. In general, it may be said that 
aestheticism has had its failures too, but these have 
never been for want of appreciation as far as the human 
self has been concerned. Aestheticism has afforded the 
self a rich content even when this content, humanistic, 
cultural, and eudaemonistic, has not always been en- 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 257 

closed in thought- forms calculated to provide a contour 
for the soul-stuff which art has had to contribute. To 
delineate a suitable form for the humanistic material 
found in the self is one of the problems of future indi- 
vidualism, which must likewise be careful to entertain 
a more critical conception of the social order which it 
has felt free to despise. It is possible for the self to 
have genuine life-content; and, if social thinking is in 
no position to supply this, then social thinking must be 
deemed inadequate. Man is possessed of genuine art, 
morality, and religion; and no enthusiasm for social 
generalizations and hypotheses gives one the right to 
ignore them. 

As social thinking has been unable to invest the self 
with any significant or valuable content, so it has been 
equally at a loss to make society appear human. Re- 
ceiving much of its impetus from the new conception 
of the species which Darwinism contributed, social sci- 
ence has often, if not habitually, allowed itself to pursue 
an uncritical argument from continuity. To move along 
in one's speculations guided by a continuous principle 
is indeed a temptation; and just as long as the facts in 
the case accompany and justify the speculation seriatim, 
criticism should seek to find no fault. Herder and 
Hegel, Comte and Spencer, thus make a fine display of 
ratiocination when they pursue their several systems 
upward from the physical order to the social or spirit- 
ual one; but individualism cannot rest calmly while the 
phenomena of the interior life are arranged after the 
manner of things in the natural order. It is perhaps 
to-be presumed that, if the world is a unity, the things 
of the spirit will harmonize with the things of the world ; 
but, from this general expectation, no one has the right 
to assume further, if he discover a principle applicable 
to the natural order, that just this same principle is 
dominant in the world of persons. 



258 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

The physical conception of society fails to account 
for the intensive content in which we recognize the 
character of man as one who has lived and worked in 
human history; at the same time, such physical sociality 
takes no account of the fact that man as man has 
asserted his humanity by opposing himself to the nat- 
ural order, as also to the immediately given social one. 
In this opposition to the given in both nature and society, 
one finds the essential principle of progress. If one seek 
to regard history as the tacit acceptance of that which 
is given without, he is able to do no more than account 
for one period of history; how that period came to be 
and how humanity managed to emerge from it to another 
is beyond the comprehension of him who fails to observe 
how prone is man to react upon the world-order in which 
he finds himself. That the individual is confronted by 
a given physico-social order is not to be doubted, but 
that he will accept this as final is far from his dispo- 
sition ; it is of the very genius of humanity to react upon 
the world without, and this reaction can find no ex- 
planation in the system of social physics. 

The natural result of a purely social conception of 
humanity is to yield no more than a sketchy view of 
human life, incident upon the fact that sociality con- 
sists of nothing more than a mere frame-work which 
is innocent of the significant and precious content it is 
supposed to contain. To make sure of this superficiality 
of social humanity, one has only to look into the pages 
of some authoritarian work in which the social view of 
art, morality, or religion, comes up for scientific treat- 
ment. What the work says may be true; but the im- 
portance of the propositions advanced is another ques- 
tion entirely. The question of scientific accuracy is one 
thing; that of practical sufficiency, another. To fill out 
the framework of sociality, which may for the sake of 
argument be assumed to be true, it is necessary to em- 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 259 

phasize the culture-content of human life : man's con- 
dition as human being, in distinction from that of the 
animal, is not a given but an acquired one; and the 
acquisition in question is most clearly understood in 
connection with a culture-concept which shall include 
the ethical and religious as well as the aesthetical. The 
life of humanity as lived, consists of an inward develop- 
ment with which the outward condition sustains only 
incidental relations. At the same time, the building of 
rb.e inner life of humanity is a genuine building in the 
spirit of which the spirit of humanity constantly affirms 
its intrinsic character. Turning from the Immediate, 
humanity sets its attention upon the Remote; given an 
exterior situation, humanity exerts itself to interiorize 
the most essential phases of its life. Now, the social 
conception of humanity fails to deal adequately with 
those things which are most essential to the life of man 
as such. 

A punctual ego in the sketchy social order is indica- 
tive of a life-situation far removed from the actual con- 
ditions which confront the individual in his human life; 
both the social self and the social order are seriously 
lacking in that sense of humanity which belongs to them. 
The lack of humanism, which makes sociality so inad- 
equate, is felt, not only in the realm of idea, but in 
connection with life-motive. He who accepts the social 
interpretation of life is thus in danger of doing some- 
thing more than to entertain superficial notions of human 
life; he is in danger of casting what should be ethical 
motives into lines of action purely exteriorizing in effect. 
Suppose that the socialization of life were to become 
so complete that all practical problems of social life were 
deemed solved; would the goal of life be then reached? 
Would it not be better to assume that, with the per- 
fection of exterior life in the social order, the beginning 
of the task had just been reached? As a matter of fact, 



2 6o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

mankind long ago decided that, however important the 
solution of exterior social questions might be, it was not 
advisable for the genius of humanity to wait for such 
amelioration before the creative work of the inner life 
was inaugurated; hence the history of humanity has 
often presented the spectacle of an inner life wholly 
elevated above the exterior conditions of human exist- 
ence, while the general tendency of humanity seems to 
have been to perfect the inner in independence and even 
defiance of the outer. A perfect individual in a perfect 
social order were indeed desirable ; but mankind has 
decided that, if perfection must be divided, it is better 
to raise the inward perfection of life above the outer 
perfection of the social order. 

The social ideal as practical, lacks creativeness as 
much as the social idea as scientific has been found to 
lack content. If, under the auspices of current social 
ethics, man is supposed to undertake adjustment and 
amelioration in the immediate order of life, it is still 
possible to assert that the old sense of creativeness is 
none the less necessary. Individualism has not failed 
to recognize this, although individualism has been sat- 
isfied with a purely inward creativeness which involved 
no more than the elaboration of man's subjective exist- 
ence. In the spirit of creativeness, nineteenth-century 
individualism was strangely indifferent to the exterior 
order, whence the sharp anti-natural and anti-social 
tendencies of the school. But the creation of life-joy, 
life- worth, and life-truth is likely to involve something 
more constructive than the egoistic will-to-selfhood could 
produce ; at the same time, it can hardly be doubted 
that aesthetic individualism was just in its insistence 
upon the creative, even when the material at hand among 
these romantic individualists was drawn as by necessity 
from their own souls. One may long to possess in his 
life such an objectivity as was witnessed in the case of 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 261 

Goethe; but, when the creative impulse is not powerful 
enough to evoke an exterior condition consonant with 
the ideal within, it is best to maintain the interior affirm- 
ation, even when there is little hope of seeing its ob- 
jective realization. In some instances, as with Emerson, 
the perfect organization of the inner life is practically 
equivalent to the creation of an objectivity; in others, 
the elaboration of the inner life ended in a pessimism 
of the noblest kind. To be wanting in objectivity may 
be painful, as the case of most individualists can attest; 
but to be wanting in that creativeness which is peculiar 
to the human self is fatal, and it is just this fatality 
which constantly threatens the life of humanity to-day. 
When life is taken up and interpreted by social 
thought, the lack of creativeness further appears in the 
painful want of life-character, whence the sons of men 
should be brought together in the spirit of mutual under- 
standing. After it was fully appreciated that the effort 
to synthesize men by means of artificial contract was in 
vain, there arose a tendency to delegate all the social 
responsibility to the hands of nature whose reputation 
for organizing was well established by the biological. 
Cells unite to form tissue, while tissue clothes the organ- 
ism in a perfect unity; such single organisms, instead 
of being left to themselves, are smoothly assembled in 
appropriate groups, which have both the forms and the 
functions of the whole. The natural synthesis of organ- 
isms which one finds in the animal order is now regarded 
as the supreme principle of organization in the human- 
istic realm, whence results the exaggerated belief in the 
powers of sociality. The reason why such natural so- 
ciality, dependent as it is upon the principle of species, 
fails, is because the creature in question is possessed of 
something more than that which the animal order is able 
to display; this more-than-natural is found in the in- 
wardness of life which includes the extra-sensitivity and 



262 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

extra-spontaneity of the individual. If man lived in the 
world of immediacy only, if he did not constantly appeal 
to his inward sense of humanity, the resort to the species 
for both idea and impulse might be sufficient; but it is 
characteristic of man to unfold and develop within his 
own consciousness the impressions that he acquires from 
the exterior, so that the result of his relation to nature 
is not to be found upon the surface of his consciousness. 
In the same manner, the individual's spontaneity is such 
as to urge the impulse onward until it has reached the 
region of those remote interests which are recognized 
in both civilization and culture, as a result of which 
tendency, man is no longer to be found in the more 
obvious phases of his natural being. Thus, to internal- 
ize the impression and to remove the impulse from its 
original source are among the most characteristic forms 
of human conduct. Now, is the biologico-social syn- 
thesis sufficient for the organization of such internal- 
ized and removed creatures? 

When viewed from the individualistic standpoint, 
human life seems conspicuously unfitted for such a 
superficial synthesis, and that because a mere gathering 
of individuals is far removed from the idea of that 
humanity which the individual feels within and which 
he endeavors to promote without. If it be granted that 
the congregative work of nature is done so perfectly 
that no more synthetic activity is needed, ethics must 
still insist that the work of humanizing men, far from 
being ended, is only just begun, since the character of 
the humanistic synthesis is, in no sense, an affair of being 
together in time and space, or a sharing of the imme- 
diate benefits and duties which exterior life presents. 
If further it be assumed that nature in synthesizing 
specimens of the human species has likewise provided 
for the social sentiment requisite for the actual realiz- 
ation of the social, it may still be pointed out that the 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 263 

creating and developing of human love is an affair which 
depends upon something characteristically human; such 
synthetic love is postulated as an ideal, not accepted as 
a fact of experience. Because human life must experi- 
ence things in its own way, man has always refused to 
abide by the simple and immediate results of natural 
organization, sufficient as this may be with other species, 
and has gone on to elaborate characteristic forms of 
conduct whose aim has been to perfect that which nature 
has only begun. In this spirit, art has set about creating 
the human as a genuine idea, while religion has worked 
upon man with the aim of having him take up the respon- 
sibilities of love as a genuine motive. It is true that 
nature does not dissociate and disintegrate; but it is 
none the less true that the naturalistic synthesis, whose 
presence is undeniable, is far from constituting a bond 
sufficient to unite the sons of men in a characteristic 
unity. In general, it may be said that the content of 
human life falls between the two stools of punctual 
personality and schematic society. 

2. Lack of Life-Character in Sociality 

Social philosophy brings men together from without, 
and fails to attribute content to human life; in the same 
manner, such social science fails to color human life 
with that moral tone which is easily recognized in the 
history of mankind. If social thought were purely ob- 
servational as it habitually assumes to be, if it were not 
a most determined philosophy replete with democratic 
prejudices, the ethical situation to-day might be vastly 
different from the spectacle of downright sociality. But 
the social thinker has old scores to settle and new am- 
bitions to gratify, and it is sincere human life which is 
called upon to bear the brunt of this dispute. In gen- 
eral, it has been the fate of social science to correct the 
errors of the Enlightenment, and this fate has often been 



264 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

a happy one. Where the Enlightenment proceeded from 
the individual as its terminus a quo and proposed to 
perfect the social order by means of utilitarian adjust- 
ment, social thinking was able to point out that" such a 
process was a posterior prius, since it is with the social 
itself that the beginning must be made. On the other 
hand, the Enlightenment, proceeding from the natural 
life of man, sought to show how morality like sociality 
had arisen from the same kind of utilitarian calculus; 
the accepted order then was from the individual to the 
social, from the natural to the moral. One half of this 
error has been corrected by the scientifico-social thinker ; 
but how has the other half of the argument fared? 

Scientific and social thinking has shown us that society 
is not a derivative notion; but has social thinking gone 
on to show further that morality likewise is as little 
derivative and as thoroughly spontaneous as the social? 
Instead of completing its work, social philosophy has 
tacitly assented to one half of the rationalistic program, 
and that to the effect that morality is an idea derived 
from the useful, even when the idea of utility had no 
effect in producing the social order. In this manner, 
social thought is one half utilitarian, and if utilitarian- 
ism be wrong, the natural conclusion must follow. With 
such a utilitarian as Mill, the ethical problem was frankly 
the dual one of explaining the social and justifying the 
moral ; one he found in the political order, the other 
in what English ethics calls " common-sense morality." 
We know now that the social order is given with man, 
so that a pre-social condition of man is not to be cred- 
ited. But we are not so ready to assert that the ethical 
condition is likewise a given datum, so that we do not 
need to premise a pre-moral condition of mankind. 
Thus far, our contention is a purely formal one, which 
consists in suggesting that, as our thought has seen fit 
to revise one phase of rationalism, it should be as scru- 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 265 

pulous in dealing with the other; but such a form of 
argumentation is not necessarily convincing, whence it 
may be that social philosophy, however imperfect it may 
be, is not necessarily inconsistent with itself. The crux 
of the contention is found in the fact that, where social 
thought admits and premises the existence of the social 
as such, it does not make the same admission in the 
case of the moral. For the social thinker, there is no 
pure morality, or morality apart from social existence, 
so that the social thinker does not feel called upon to 
explain the existence of a thing when he has not previ- 
ously admitted the fact of existence. In connection with 
pure morality, there is no need of an argument quid 
juris, since there is no argument quid facti. 

Expressed with perfect frankness, the social argument 
is to the effect that there is no free morality. As a 
result, social thought is consistent in neglecting that 
utilitarian argument in the light of which the moral is 
derived from the useful, for the reason that, with social- 
ity, what was useful at the beginning is useful now. 
In a certain sense, there is no utilitarianism, no relativ- 
ism about the social contention, because there is moralic 
other to which the socially useful is to be related. In 
this sense, social thought is absolutistic ; where the au- 
tonomous moralist contends, " Morality for the sake of 
morality," the social thinker urges, " Society for the 
sake of society." The result of this ethical situation is 
that one should not attempt to criticize the means by 
which the social thinker seeks to effect the transition 
from the social to the moral, since this transition is not 
for a moment attempted; rather must one criticize the 
attempt of the scientifico-social moralist to make social- 
ity the end of human life. Because the social thinker 
does thus attempt to survey human life under the form 
of the social, individualism is forced to contend that 
such a morale fails to express the inward character of 
human life as lived by mankind. 



266 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

Let it be admitted, then, that morality is not a deriva- 
tive product, but a kind of thing in itself ; the only ques- 
tion remaining will be one of characteristic content. 
The thought of the day, even when the influence of the 
evolutionary is never overlooked, is such as to suggest 
the abandonment of the one-time philosophy of history 
which sought to derive all higher things from lower ones, 
especially inferior ones of a different kind. Are we not 
now in a position where, instead of indulging in these 
transmutations, we premise at the beginning just what 
we find now? The study of humanity does not reveal 
the presence of any pre-artistic period from which art 
was derived, of any pre-religious period which was 
responsible for the later derivation of human faith ; in 
the same manner, our current conception of history does 
not call upon us to premise a pre-social period here or 
a pre-moral epoch there. This is not a reactionary point, 
but merely an attempt to deal justly with the forms of 
life which lie at hand. As man has always been social 
and artistic and religious, so man has always possessed 
that which may be called, " moral," whatever such a 
term may be taken to signify. Thus, the spontaneity of 
the moral may be placed along side the idea of spon- 
taneity as this appears in society as such, the artistic 
and religious in particular. 

With the passing of the psycho-genetic problem of 
how morality came to be what it is, there has arisen a 
movement calculated to work upon the actual character 
of the moral; with the question of morality's source an 
overcome standpoint, all interest now centers in the 
attempt to evaluate morality as a social affair and that 
alone. The line of moral descent is one and continuous, 
so that the whole question is one concerning the char- 
acter of this continuous morale. To-day, the ethical 
ideal appears concretely in the form of " middle-class 
morality." Nietzsche's distinction between " master 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 267 

morality " and " slave morality " tends to obscure from 
our eye the fact that the actual life of man to-day is 
carried on with Philistine principles as its sanction. 
Where the social order was purely bi-partite and thus 
consisted of master and slave, the Nietzschean distinc- 
tion might have had meaning; but, with the tri-partition 
of society into worker, bourgeois, and aristocrat, and 
with the elevation of the bourgeosie, the old distinction 
loses weight. The middle-class person has entered the 
scene, which he has colored in a manner both economic 
and ethical ; the " pathos of distance " has been lost to 
view in the middle distance of the bourgeois landscape. 
As the result of this, the time-honored conflict between 
master and slave has given way to a situation marked by 
general fermentation among all those who make up life 
in its mediocrity. If there is any real conflict, this is 
found in the opposition which the middle-class person 
encounters on both sides of his social being, which is 
threatened now by the physical needs of the worker and 
now by the ideals of the artist. Indeed, instead of there 
being a conflict between the extremes of society, where 
the slave might be thought to array his rude powers 
against the finer weapons of the aristocrat, the social 
situation reveals the fact that artisan and artist are not 
far from unity of opinion in the matter of the life-ideal, 
while the unanimity of their views has become more 
perfect in their common antipathy to the property-hold- 
ing middle-class. 

The development of individualism, while it expressed 
as its chief concern the welfare of the superior man in 
a social order where exterior well-being was the sole 
rule, was not carried on without an eye to the spiritual 
condition of the laboring class. Indeed, one might go 
so far as to assert that, in the instance of the modern 
drama, the opposition to middle-class ideals was carried 
on so thoroughly that this special fine art could be found 



268 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

to represent the claims of the laborer, even when the 
avowed purpose of the literary movement was idealistic 
and aristocratic. If this be not the case, how will one 
explain the romantic drama of Victor Hugo, the de- 
cadent theatre of Ibsen, the avowedly social plays of 
Hauptmann? Strindberg cannot keep his class-conflict 
motive, passing back and forth as it does from the high 
to the low, from the low to the high, from involving the 
middle-class situation; Bernard Shaw does not attempt 
to. The literary impulse, then, is in opposition to noth- 
ing so much as to the Bourgeoisie. To observe the per- 
fection with which the middle-class has aligned its moral 
ideal, one can do no better than review the history of 
nineteenth-century drama. 

But what is there about middle-class morality that 
permits of exact formulation? Wherein does it invite 
individualistic opposition? The present social situation 
without and within is responsible for this strange moralic 
creature, the " good man " of the day. In the social- 
ization of life and the socialization of character, all the 
issues of human existence were assembled in such a 
manner as to make a compromising ideal of mediocrity 
a matter of necessity. Thus, in a general fashion, when 
all men were either found to have been living, or were 
forced by industry to live one common life, the ideal of 
an ordinary morality was soon forthcoming. If one 
live to oneself in aesthetic or religious retreat, it is not 
necessary to align a code of conduct open to and binding 
upon all. When each man had his own work and, to 
a certain degree, lived his own life, a universal morality 
was nothing more than an overarching blue of moral 
dignity ; in this sky, one might read his duty for himself. 
Now, assemble men in life and work, through history 
bring past and present together, place all the sons of 
men upon the same limited earth, and the result is not 
far to seek : all will needs have the same moral life. 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 269 

This moral life must not be too high or too low; it 
must be an average morality, whence the derivation of 
the morale of the middle class. 

The workings of this mediocre morale appear more 
distinctly when one reviews the history of modern 
ethics, and observes how the extremes of ethical thought 
were forced to scfrnething like a mutual understanding. 
Where hedonism had grown up as a philosophy of 
human enjoyment, where rigorism was no less free from 
any social suggestion, the Epicurean and Stoic each went 
his own way. There was indeed no little conflict be- 
tween these classic schools, nor was there absent from 
their extremes a kind of community, which appeared in 
their ultimate ideals. Epicureanism postulated an ata- 
raxy, Stoicism an apathy; but this surprising unanimity, 
while it fused ideal with ideal, made no room for the 
social; the opponents came to an agreement independ- 
ently. Modern thought, in casting about for its moral- 
ity, could do no better than adopt the ethics of these 
ancient schools, whence the rise of hedonism and rigor- 
ism. Now, from the beginning, hedonism showed a 
reluctance to re-enter the Garden of Epicurus, where 
the sole life-ideal was one of enjoyment; hedonism 
thought it better to " cultivate the garden." In the same 
way, intuitional rigorism, instead of taking its stand by 
Stoic Porch, thought to make morality more active, more 
practical. Hedonism repugned the egoism involved in 
the idea of enjoyment, and set up the ideal of the 
" greatest happiness of the greatest number," while 
rigorism, led astray at the outset by Hobbes, began to 
construe the chief duty as that of benevolence. It was 
in connection with the idea of benevolence that Cum- 
berland began the attack upon the egoism and relativism 
of Hobbes. There were some rigorists who withstood 
the temptation to make duty a matter of benevolence, 
prominent among whom was Butler, with his ideal of 



270 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



" cool self-love," and Kant, who regarded sympathy as 
something " pathological." But, whether the avowed 
rigorist himself asserted the supremacy of benevolence, 
he placed his theory in such a position that it was not 
difficult for the middle-class moralist to make the ideal 
his own. 

The place where the opposed schools themselves came 
to an agreement was found in their insistence, here, upon 
sympathy, there, upon conscience; now, compassion and 
compunction are not very different, hence the hedonist 
and intuitionist had become so msllowed that they 
promptly fell from the tree when Philistinism shook the 
branches. With the hedonist, there was no longer an 
enjoyment which he could keep within his own breast; 
with the rigorist, naught of the self-styled duty remained. 
For both hedonist and rigorist there remained but one 
duty, that of social concern. For this reason, the stu- 
dent of ethics, who really enjoyed the extremes of a 
modern morality which, until the days of a Sidgwick 
and a Martineau, had managed to keep clear of the 
social tendency, can no longer take pleasure in the one- 
time battle of moral wits, for all is now social and 
inferior; the individualistic, which made it possible for 
Martineau to win the battle for conscience, the egoistic 
which drove Sidgwick to, and indeed beyond, the pos- 
sibilities of his traditional hedonism, is now snugly 
ensconced in the social, so that rigorous saint and 
hedonist statesman toil side by side in their social 
service. 

Middle-class morality thus differs from the free mor- 
ality of earlier ethics in that middle-class morality is 
without individualism, without idealism. No longer are 
there any joys, no longer any duties ; no sorrow, no sin ; 
all has become " social service." The battle for life- 
inferiority has been fought and won ; alas ! the conflict 
was carried on in the night, in the silence; it was blood- 



THE SOCIALIZATION OF LIFE 



271 



less, smokeless. All are in the net except the decadent 
egoists, who maintain their independence at the expense 
of being anti-social, anti-scientific. The reply of indi- 
vidualism to the socialization of life will be found to be 
complementary to the three-tongued retort to the sci- 
entism which sought the complete naturalization of 
human existence. There, it was aestheticism, immoral- 
ism, and irrationalism ; here it will be decadence, pes- 
simism, skepticism. Whatever may have been the 
original source of these life-ideals, whether in direct 
opposition to the social or after the manner of a free 
individualism rejoicing in its own strength, it cannot be 
overlooked that present-day individualism makes use of 
the decadent, pessimistic, and skeptical in order to cast 
off the oppressive yoke of the social ideal. In all this, 
there is a certain value which the opposition has for the 
individualist; for now, instead of a passive sense of joy, 
worth, and truth, he must engender in his own veins 
and nerves a clear and convincing sense of the inherent 
sense of the joyful, the worthful, and the truthful in 
this his own human life. 

Finally, the loss of character in human life expresses 
itself in the form of a conflict between inferiorism and 
superiorism. From the social point of view, life is 
necessarily an affair of inferiority; given ideals, and 
the whole social argument goes to pieces. On the other 
hand, when one strives to uphold the idea that life is 
superior, he encounters all the disadvantages which have 
ever followed the notion of aristocracy in human exist- 
ence. But the contention of individualism is to the 
effect that it is life itself, not any one individual or any 
class of men, which is superior; individualism advances 
the plain but difficult proposition that man is great. It 
is true that this can be doubted and denied, but the 
doubt and denial involved in such a human pretension 
cannot justly come from the social quarter, where there 



2/2 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



is no attempt to try the spirits of humanity to see 
whether they be superior or not. Individualism has 
been more than honest in raising the question whether 
man's life is such as to justify the attributes " great," 
" superior," " fine " ; indeed, it is individualism which 
proposes just such an investigation when it raises eudae- 
monistic, ethical, and religious issues. Having witnessed 
the individualistic struggle for the joy, worth, and truth 
of life in the natural order, we must further observe 
how this philosophy of life considers society as the place 
of such joyousness, value, and truthfulness. 



PART TWO 
THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 

THE easy victory of sociality over the individual, 
wherein the one-time egoism of the Enlighten- 
ment succumbed to the morale of the " altruis- 
tically " social and the " morally " conventional, has 
placed the aesthetico-intellectual individual in a peculiar 
position. The new ego is now recognized most dis- 
tinctly in his anti-social character; he does not fail to 
possess or to enjoy a living content of cultured inner 
life, but the expression of his personality is more often 
found in that polemical attitude which places him in 
opposition to the social order. That the polemical is 
not the primary characteristic of the self, which is con- 
secrated to the inner life as such, will appear when the 
repudiation of society by the self is made an object of 
direct analysis; that the self should have a world, is a 
contention which the final and constructive portion of 
this study will need to consider. In order to make clear 
the attitude of the self toward society, we can do no 
better than consider what such a society of individuals 
might be supposed to be; then the impossibilities of the 
present order and the promises of a future one will 
appear most clearly. In the attempt to relate the self 
to the social order, individualism looks upon that order 
as something so like the individual as to be at once 
joyful, worthful, and truthful. But, where the indi- 
vidual, in premising his social order, fails to find society 
the place of joys, or the place of values, or the place of 
truths, he is forced to resort to decadence, to pessimism, 
to skepticism. In analyzing these three anti-social atti- 
tudes, it will appear that, in the first instance, decadence 
assumes a subjective character in accordance with which 



274 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



the individual is simply morbid; from this he passes to 
the anti-social. In the world of values, the individual 
is primarily an inward nihilist whose negations have to 
do with his own private sense of values; from this he 
advances to social pessimism. In connection with the 
world of truths, the ego begins by assuming an individ- 
ualistic dilettantism, then concludes by resorting to social 
skepticism. In order to observe the contrast between 
individual and society, it is necessary to consider the 
manner in which the individual estimates human joy, 
human value, human truth. 

I. LIFE THE PLACE OF JOYS 

Just as scientism has no genuine rationale of joy, so 
sociality fails to provide a morale for the life of inward 
enjoyment; and just as individualism was called upon 
to deliver the independent soul-state, so it is now neces- 
sitated to redeem the eudaemonistic content of such soul- 
states in the form of a living sense of joy in life. In 
order to perfect the argument for the joy of life, it 
becomes necessary, first of all, to understand just what 
happiness is supposed to mean to humanity. In the 
larger sense, the whole question of happiness focuses 
in the competitive ideals of possession of happiness as 
a state of mind and the pursuit of happiness by means 
of the will's activities. Instead of indulging in an ethical 
comparison of these contrary ideals, individualism has 
been made to feel that the elder ideal of happiness as a 
possession of the desired object has been forced to make 
way for the more modern conception of happiness in 
the form of energy and function ; energistic eudaemon- 
ism is thus the source which is to be tapped by him who 
would comprehend the eudaemonistic problem. With 
ancient classicism, the happiness of possession was the 
accepted notion ; where Aristotle, the most perfect of 
classic eudaemonists, seems to base happiness upon 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 275 

energy, his ethics will be found to temper this energy 
by moderation and to bring to perfect rest in godlike 
contemplation of the world. The modern classicism of 
the eighteenth century had a similar message for man; 
for the ethics of this period expressed the idea that 
man, by summing up his various special pleasures, might 
enjoy the possession of them as a whole. Now the 
classic possession of joy is lost to the modern individual; 
and, if he is able to resume the ideal, it will be, not by 
virtue of a mere having of happiness, but by means of 
the acquisition of joy through some form of work. 
Joy must be willed; then, joy must become the object 
of direct consciousness. But, by means of what kind of 
willing does the consciousness of joy come into being? 

1. Humanity and Happiness 

Where there is no deliberate morale of happiness, there 
is no possibility of establishing any essential connection 
between happiness and life. To take happiness for 
granted, and then seek to measure the worth of life 
upon the basis of joy's presence or joy's absence, is 
fatal to a serious life-philosophy. As a matter of mere 
actuality, it may be said that the individual man may go 
through life accompanied by habitual satisfaction and 
yet not really live as a human being. On the other 
hand, so distinct are life and happiness, one might even 
do his work in the world and realize life's values with- 
out leading what is considered a happy life. Life is 
not itself enjoyment ; so that to enjoy is not to live, 
while to live is not to enjoy. This paradoxical con- 
dition of things, which ever baffles the moralist whose 
ideals are framed according to the plan of eighteenth- 
century hedonism, tends to clear up when one realizes 
that, instead of being confined to the idea of happiness, 
human life has at its disposal other possibilities in the 
form of life's worth and truth. The joy of life should 

18 



276 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

indeed take its place beside the sense of worth and truth, 
but the joy of life should not be allowed to encroach 
upon these other precincts and thus make human exist- 
ence appear a mere matter of enjoyment. When the 
joy of life is properly related to the sense of worth and 
truth, the joy of life becomes a plausible ideal; when 
the sense of joy is isolated, the proof that it is all is a 
proof that it is naught. Yet it is not with eighteenth- 
century hedonism that one has now to do, since this 
bland doctrine has beeri swallowed up in such amiable 
notions as the struggle for existence and the health of 
the social organism. For this reason, individualism 
must first rescue happiness, and then establish it upon 
a proper foundation of eudaemonism. 

The sense of happiness is of great importance to indi- 
vidualism, not only in the establishing of joy itself, but 
in the attempt to show that life is possessed of worth 
and truth. Take away the joy of living, and you do 
more than eliminate so much happiness from human 
existence; you threaten life's sense of worth and truth 
as well. If life have no joy, can it be said to have 
value, or truth? Now, to establish the living sense of 
joy, individualism must do more than assume happiness 
for man; individualism must elaborate the sense of joy 
by means of those volitional and intellectual forces 
which make happiness something willed and something 
thought. Social thought is in no position to supply 
mankind with a sense of joy. Social thinking may come 
to the conclusion that the human self does exist just as 
it may strive to supply the individual with the means of 
existence; but, when it comes to deducing and further- 
ing the inward sense of joy in life, social thought makes 
poor work of eudaemonism. To perfect the social con- 
cept, Man, social thinking has had to make use of such 
generalization that the resulting idea of humanity applies 
to all and yet to none. It is to individualism, therefore, 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 277 

that one must appeal if one would learn aught concern- 
ing the joy of life. 

(1) Happiness as Willed 

In asserting that joy is something which must be willed, 
individualism tends to assume that happiness is impera- 
tive for life; this assumption is due to the fact that 
individualism, although it may admit that life can go 
on even when life is not pleasant, cannot admit likewise 
that life can be perfect when life is wanting in joy. 
Where the social ideal is satisfied when it has put the 
individual in a position where he may serve the State, 
individualism cannot rest content until it has so placed 
the ego that the ego may draw some benefit from life. 
If, in its decadent forms, individualism may persuade 
the individual to get too much out of life, social thinking 
places the self in a moral situation where he cannot draw 
enough out of existence. Viewed in a natural manner, 
the social order may be thought of as the place where 
the joys of life are to be found and realized. Where 
the joy of life fails to find a social form, the endeavor 
to realize the joy of existence tends ever to assume the 
character of decadence, and from this both the indi- 
vidual and society suffer. In spite of the risk of con- 
stituting joy as an anti-social decadence, it must be 
affirmed that happiness must come into being as a con- 
scious creation. Neither nature with its physical re- 
sources nor society with its perfected means of existence 
can supply that which man is destined to will for him- 
self as his own. The failure to recognize this has led 
to much error in the treatment of eudaemonism. 

The creation of human happiness, to which all art is 
instinctively devoted, is a necessity with a creature whom 
nature can produce but cannot contain. Even when, as 
in antiquity, man was of the opinion that the function 
of art was to imitate nature, it was still insisted that 



278 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

nature as such is not sufficient for man, who must create 
his own joys if he is to have them. When romantic art 
reveals to us the spiritual character of beauty and joy, 
it more than convinces us that our human happiness, 
instead of consisting of something given in the world of 
things, is an ideal which is to be realized by man only 
after a conscious search and a deliberate effort. This 
necessity of a created happiness is due to the fact that 
the inner life of man, rather than consisting of a series 
of conscious states following upon one another as a 
mere train of ideas, is made up of a unified whole of 
the individual as one who thinks, and wills, and is. 
For this reason, happiness must come from within as 
a complete creation whose separate elements may come 
from nature, but whose form and character depend upon 
the independent activity of the human self. The natur- 
istic view of the inner life as a series of associated states 
may account for pleasure, but it cannot measure up to 
the demands of the eudaemonistic standard or the aes- 
thetic ideal. 

Not only is emotion by nature internal, but its inner 
character has something dynamic about it, so that when 
one would will himself, as indeed the would-be egoist 
must do, he finds that joy is the primary condition of 
creative work. The traditional method of handling 
eudaemonism has prejudiced us with the thought that 
enjoyment is to be treated teleologically ; happiness 
forms the need which we are seeking, the goal toward 
which we strive. Even the forbidding morale of Kant 
did not forbid the entrance of joy, provided that joy 
were delayed until, having toiled under the yoke of the 
Categorical Imperative, the moralistic pilgrim found 
himself at his journey's end. But the egoistic usage of 
the eudaemonistic ideal differs from this more staid 
conception in that egoism demands joy now as the con- 
dition of genuine work. It was not for happiness as 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 279 

the result of labor, but for happiness in labor, that 
Faust struggled, while it was for the sake of exercising, 
and not simply enjoying, happiness that Candide culti- 
vated the garden. Pleasure is power; the very physi- 
ology of the feeling is sufficient to show this. Under 
the influence of the pleasurable, the muscles thicken, the 
veins swell, the lungs increase in capacity. The biology 
of the feeling further advises us that pleasure increases 
vitality and raises the tide of life to its tone of excess. 
Where one works during the experience of pain, he 
creates by means of pleasure; in the one case, it is the 
will minus, in the other, the will plus. Hence we find 
the Romanticist praising the pleasurable, not because of 
its enjoyable, but on account of its energistic character. 
If joy comes through work, creativeness comes from 
joy. Eudaemonists have usually been found to exalt 
activity as a means of happiness, but the converse is 
none the less true; activity comes through happiness. 
We cultivate the garden in order to find joy; but it is 
by means of joy that we are able to cultivate the garden. 
In the instance of the artistic will-to-create, the prime 
requisite is the sense of superabundance, which brings 
into being that which is new and worthy. Without this 
sense of joy in life, art would never have evinced its 
characteristic phenomenon of ideal excitement, whose 
essential nature appears in the play-activity so well 
known in aesthetic thought. For the usual work of the 
world an ordinary frame of mind is sufficient to effect 
the end desired in the production of the useful; but for 
the creation of the beautiful, the gift that the genius has 
bestowed upon humanity, the play activity of pleasure is 
made necessary. It was in this spirit that Schiller made 
Romanticism possible ; " Man is only completely man 
when he plays." x Schlegel furthers this ideal of play- 
pleasure when he attributes the greatness of Grecian 

1 Werke, ed. Hempel, Bd. XV, 392. 



2 8o THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

poetry to a Genuss vollstandig und selbstgenugsam. 2 
Now the supreme difference between the hedonism of 
Rationalism and the eudaemonism of Romanticism can- 
not fail to appear, while the justification of selfhood in 
the joy of living is not so far from completion. Hap- 
piness now appears as something inward and spiritual, 
while its character, no longer viewed as something man 
would greedily seize from the world but rather as some- 
thing he would generously create within, is more thor- 
oughly appreciated. 

In the art of Wagner, the argument for eudaemon- 
istic egoism is not presented with the same simplicity, 
inasmuch as the author of Der Ring des Nibelungen 
indulges in pessimism. The joy of living thus expresses 
itself in contrast to the idea of world-sorrow, while 
happiness is that which is to be sought. In the con- 
trast between the attempts at self-realization as these 
are carried on by the god Wotan and the man Siegfried, 
the argument against the godhead of the one and the 
contention in favor of the supremacy of the other rests 
almost wholly upon eudaemonistic grounds. Wotan is 
not fitted for the position which he assumes, not because 
he is unholy, but because he is unhappy; his aim in life 
is not directed toward the realization of himself as 
moralist, for he habitually shows himself to be a char- 
acter with whom the ethical appeal was not in vain, as 
when he rejects the advice of the joyous Briinhilde only 
to espouse the righteous cause of Fricka. Wotan suffers 
from restraint and sadness, which dual malady he con- 
fesses to his favorite Valkyrie as soon as he has given 
the oath to protect Siegmund's foe : " Ich unfreiester 
aller . . . Der trauerigste bin ich von Allen"' 3 Like 
his father, Wotan, Siegmund is not disturbed at the 
thought that his enemy can accuse him of unholiness, 
for he is thoroughly absorbed with self-accusation of 

2 Uber die Griechen u. Romer, 133. 3 Walkiire, II Akt, II Sc. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 281 

sadness : " Wehwalt muss ich mich nennen." 4 Both 
father and son, equipped with all the arms of conflict, 
fail in their battle for no other reason than that they 
are unhappy. Wotan can provide the needed sword, 
but the internal weapon of joyousness he cannot furnish. 

In his attempt to delineate the character of the super- 
man, Siegfried, Wagner does not find it is his mind to 
instill into the veins of the youth a quantum of joy that 
should outweigh the sense of sorrow from which both 
Wotan and Siegmund were oppressed; instead of the 
eudaemonistic, therefore, he makes use of the ideal of 
freedom. Alien and inimical to the gods, " fremd dem 
Gotte, entgegen dem Gott," Siegfried was fated to fight 
for the cause of the gods, whereby he becomes greater 
than the gods, because he was possessed of more free- 
dom, " der freier als ich, der Gott." 5 In the develop- 
ment of the character of Siegfried, Wagner seems to 
confine his attention to the ideal of fearlessness, even 
where the sense of joyousness is ever implied by the 
character and work of the hero. Fearlessness in his 
flesh, joyousness in his blood, Siegfried thus becomes 
the means of redeeming godhead from care. 

In the elaboration of the ideal individual as the super- 
man, the necessity of life- joyousness has shown itself 
to be indispensable to the egoist. Nietzsche repudiated 
both weakness and sorrow at one stroke ; although 
himself a man of sorrows, Nietzsche never gave recog- 
nition to the sorrow which sought to claim him as its 
own. His was a feverish eudaemonism, a violent will 
to enjoyment, while his most relentless criticisms were 
directed against an ascetic morality which set up misery, 
Blend or alienation from the self, as its ideal. In the 
midst of this was the thought that pain signifies nega- 
tion, joy affirmation, although Nietzsche had nothing in 
common with an evolutionary ethics which strives to 

* lb., I Aid, II Sc. 5 lb., II AM, II Sc; III Akt, III Sc. 



282 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

connect sense-pleasure with life-advancing, sense-pain 
with life-hindering tendencies. The spirit of Nietzschean 
eudaemonism was echoed by Hauptmann in The Sunken 
Bell, where Heinrich was led to fail because his work, 
while accomplished with skill and fidelity, was not the 
work of joy. It was in " nameless agony " that he had 
toiled ; but he was no master, because he was not happy. 
But, when Heinrich set himself to the tasks of a super- 
man, he achieved the victory through joy; hence he was 
able to say, " Now, I am both happy and a master." 6 
In the midst of the emancipation of the aesthetical, 
the individual did not fail to come into his kingdom; 
" art for art's sake " conveyed the corollary, " art for 
the artist's sake." By means of such logic, it appears 
that the individual who has the ideal of aesthetic enjoy- 
ment is thereby afforded a means of isolating himself 
from both the world and society, as these are constructed 
in rationalistic and moralistic forms. No longer need 
the mind remain imprisoned in the fixed forms of rational 
thought ; no longer need the will abide by the established 
norms of conduct; but both intellect and will may go 
forth in search of a free world, a free humanity. With 
Romanticism, this freedom was postulated as an ideal; 
with Decadence, it became revolution; with Symbolism, 
it advanced upon the strongholds of scientism and social 
thought. As a result, the individualism of the present 
finds the ego setting himself in opposition to hard and 
fast lines with which science has encircled mankind. 
Where religion, suffering under the oppression of agnos- 
ticism which forbade belief in any Beyond-Science, was 
possessed of a morale which forbade it to attack sci- 
entism upon the ethico-social side, art has been doubly 
free, in that art has admitted obligation to neither the 
metaphysical nor the moral. Indeed, the failure of 
religion to redeem the spiritual life of humanity is to 
« Op. cit., Act III. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 283 

be attributed to no other cause than religion's unwilling- 
ness to negate the social morality which science appended 
to its positivistic theory of thought. Religion was free 
in intellect, but not in will; art emancipated itself from 
the domination of both intellectualistic scientism and 
voluntaristic social thought. Where religion !ias wished 
to be free, science has willed to be free, and where 
religion could not harden its heart against the seductive 
ideal of social sympathy, art has indulged in the im- 
passibilite of Baudelaire, as it had adopted the maxim 
to which Nietzsche afterwards gave expression, " Be 
hard ! " 

In the dialectics of human happiness, three elemental 
functions of the mind offer themselves as so many bases 
for eudaemonism ; these are, sense, will, and intellect. 
The common endeavor to found happiness upon a series 
of agreeable experiences has always been fraught with 
contradiction and perplexity; but, since happiness seems 
imperative and since no other than sensuous means of 
enjoyment seem promising, the eudaemonistic philosophy 
of life has often been led to place its cause in the hands 
of hedonism. Hedonism has responded to this by at- 
tempting to endow the passing pleasure with something 
more than merely temporary enjoyment, whence the 
elaboration of the hedonic calculus and the hedonic law. 
Where the hedonic calculus attempts to introduce a 
mathematical principle of connection among pleasures, 
the hedonic law has sought to make the bond of union 
something physical. In both theories, it is recognized 
that the isolated pleasures cannot offer support to that 
which is so continuous as life. Pleasures which come 
and go present themselves in the form of a broken line 
whose discontinuity cannot act as a vehicle to convey life 
to its desired end. In itself, life is a totality, while the 
pleasures of life are so many periodic units. When 
hedonism attempts its synthesis of pleasures in the form 



284 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of a sum, it finds that these periodic and temporary 
experiences do not respond to the calculating effort of 
the mind, while the biological attempt at summarization 
has the effect of forcing the feeling of pleasure down 
below the surface of consciousness. In the one case, 
pleasure becomes no more than an element in a mental 
process ; in the other, it is none other than a sign of 
physical well-being. On this account, the hedonist, 
who believes in pleasure as such, may well protest that 
the sense of his doctrine is lost to him in the midst of 
the mathematical and biological. 

Among those who have sought to find a basis for 
human happiness, it is significant that the hedonic joy 
of sense has never received any substantial recognition; 
happiness was premised as something obtaining in either 
intellect or will, in some sense of truth or worth. 
Granted that conscious life has its origin in sensitivity, 
the only question for the hedonist concerned itself with 
the development of that sensitivity, whether as a life of 
action or a life of thought. Where ancient optimism 
took up the problem, it was concluded by Aristotle that 
happiness is equivalent to the full functioning of the 
mind, to activity rather than to passivity. With the 
pessimism of modern thought, activity was again ap- 
pealed to by the eudaemonist; only, with the modern, 
activity was regarded as a means assuaging the inherent 
sorrow of life as life. In opposition to passivistic hedon- 
ism, this view of the problem has the advantage of point- 
ing out that happiness must be conceived of after the 
manner of action and work, although from this it does 
not follow that such work is the prerogative of the 
practical will alone. 

The argument against happiness as a willed happiness, 
even when the activism involved can hardly be ques- 
tioned, lies in the fact that such activism is advanced, 
not as a pure means of producing positive joy, but as 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 285 

an anodyne calculated to neutralize the distressing effects 
of sorrow. With Voltaire and Goethe, the apparent 
invalidity of the intellect as a means of producing hap- 
piness was the negative basis upon which the joy of 
work was postulated. Such was the case likewise with 
Flaubert and Turgenieff, who indeed were more con- 
cerned with negation of intellect as a means of inward 
enjoyment than with the assertion of will as the positive 
method of arriving at the all-desired end. The natural 
result of such eudaemonism is such as to advance the 
idea of stupefaction rather than that of satisfaction; 
life thus becomes, not that which is to be realized, but 
that from which the self must escape, and it is as a 
door of egress that activity is proposed. Nevertheless, 
however imperfect the energistic argument may have 
been in the hands of its advocates, it seems difficult to 
invalidate the fact that human happiness is so depend- 
ent upon the human will that such happiness must be 
willed and created. 

When work is advanced as an ideal means of arriving 
at the joy of life, it should not be forgotten that work 
contains other elements besides the eudaemonistic one. 
While it may always be suggested that work means joy, 
the fact remains that work has about it that which is 
instinctive within and necessary without, so that work 
can hardly be regarded as man's chosen means of secur- 
ing happiness in life. The will belongs to biology and 
economics ; and, since it is not the exclusive property 
of the free ego, its eudaemonistic character is far from 
being pure. Whatever may have been said of work in 
the past, the organization of work under the auspices 
of modern industrialism is such as to make the eudae- 
monistic argument exceedingly weak. Where the free 
individual doing his own work may present the picture 
of something like the joy of life, the enslaved worker 
laboring for others is an argument against the happiness 



286 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of activity. In place of joy, labor sets up necessity as 
its goal; and it is only in a furtive manner that happi- 
ness creeps into the usual activity of the laborer. In 
spite of this actual hindrance which confronts him who 
would regard happiness as that which is found in activ- 
ity, eudaemonism is still in a position to assert that the 
genius of joy is found in some form of activity. Man 
may be man when he works or when he plays; at any 
rate, it is some kind and measure of activity which 
produce joy, for joy is ever that which the will creates. 
In the case of art, where the will acts purely and from 
spontaneous motives, the essence of joy in life appears 
as nowhere else. As a form of activity, art has in it 
the factors desired ; namely, activity and freedom. 

Individualism proceeds to its ideal of happiness by 
making a clear distinction between the will within and 
work without. Where the attempt to find happiness in 
work so involves the idea of preoccupation with the 
objective world and weariness of life within, the ideal 
of happiness a willed condition of mind is forced to 
turn to art as the type of true individual action. Not 
all can be artists where all can be workers, yet the art- 
ideal may be instructive where the work-ideal is mis- 
leading. Art upholds the idea of work only in so far 
as work can bear the stamp of the inner life, only as 
far as the individual can call it his own; at the same 
time, art as work is perfected, not for the work's sake, 
but in behalf of the active individual seeking self- 
expression. If happiness were a gift which man receives 
from the world, all that the joy of life would demand 
would consist in the ability to receive the given ; but 
happiness shows itself to be a willed condition of things ; 
it comes into being as a creation of the human mind. 
In the social order, the rule of action is that of work, 
whence it becomes well nigh impossible for the social 
order to organize itself into a place of happiness for 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 287 

mankind. This situation is made more than usually 
paradoxical by the further fact that, in the last one 
hundred years, man has advanced most marvelously in 
the direction of knowledge both of man and of the 
world, as psychological and physical science can attest; 
and yet this power over both the self and the world has 
not had the effect of producing a corresponding degree 
of life-joy; indeed, the period in question has been 
marked by pessimism and nihilism. The will to joy has 
been misdirected, so that the social order which results 
is far from being the place of happiness. 

(2) The Consciousness of Happiness 

The sense of happiness which is created by the will 
must further reveal itself as that of which the individual 
is conscious. Happiness consists of an inner existence 
for which the mind of the individual is responsible. 
Moreover, he who would be happy must have capacity 
for joy, and this is to be developed after the manner 
of aesthetics. In the minds of hedonists, who are mar- 
velously ill adapted to speak on the subject of happiness, 
what individualism seeks to call joy is confused with 
something biological or psychological ; aesthetic enjoy- 
ment is thus reduced to the idea of the satisfaction of 
bodily wants and the functioning of physiological forces, 
or it is turned into the shallow by- water of immediate 
pleasure. Individualism, however, realizing that the joy 
of life is something unique, attempts to instill a spirit 
of appreciation in the light of which humanity may be 
able to contemplate and react upon the world with 
appropriate satisfaction. Owing to the fact that the 
joy of life is usually confined to the gifted and finely 
equipped personality, individualism finds it necessary to 
advance the idea that happiness must be accorded a 
place in the social life of man. 

The habitual conception of the social order exhausts 



288 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

itself with the ideas of existence and work; society is 
viewed as the place where one lives and labors. But, 
with the development of art, as with the emphasis which 
is to be laid on the aesthetic side of man's nature, the 
idea of society as the place of joy comes into more 
prominence. Those who are skilful in framing the 
practical plan of a state are the ones to whom we must 
look for the realization of this idea ; they must decide 
whether with capitalism or socialism man is likely to 
receive the greatest opportunity for that development 
of his inner life which shall make the state a place of 
enjoyment. As now viewed, enjoyment and aesthetic 
entertainment are confined to what is called " leisure," 
in connection with leisure classes and leisure times for 
those who are the workers. Idealistic individualism, 
while surrendering the practical arrangement of these 
social affairs to professional social thinkers, seeks to 
safeguard the life-ideal of joy. In the eyes of individ- 
ualism, it is a mistake to relegate happiness to leisure; 
indeed, individualism refuses to admit that life should 
have leisure. Happiness, instead of being confined to 
the exceptional phases of human life, is something which 
should be consonant with life itself; for it is a mistake 
to divide men into the classes of those who work and 
those who play, just as it is false to the individual to 
divide his time into hours of toil and hours of enjoy- 
ment. 

In our hedonic hurry, in which we have assumed that 
we have the idea of happiness and lack only the prac- 
tical means or the opportunity of realizing this, we have 
indulged in a false psychology. In accordance with the 
usual conception of human life, we have been assuming 
that man must be taught to labor and inspired to toil 
diligently; and, when we have come to the question of 
enjoyment, we have presumed that that was a question 
which would take care of itself. Almost the contrary 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 289 

is the rule. Man, who has so much of the animalistic 
about him, easily adapts himself to the motor conditions 
of life in connection with which his work in the world 
is to be performed, so that to teach and to stimulate the 
will is by no means as necessary as one might imagine. 
On the other hand, nature does not prepare man for the 
inward enjoyment of his life, whence it becomes neces- 
sary for humanity to devote itself to the creation of 
conscious enjoyment. As society has been far more 
successful in creating than in distributing wealth, so it 
has done more toward solving the problem of work than 
of happiness; society has centered its attention upon 
labor rather than leisure, so that genuine happiness is 
now far removed from the existence of the individual. 
Humanity must be taught to enjoy the world in which 
it exists. To assume that man recognizes happiness 
when he sees it, and to conclude that all he needs is to 
find the path to his eudaemonistic goal, is to oppose the 
facts of experience. The ground of happiness is as 
mysterious as the ground of duty and truth ; all three 
phases of man's life are so interdependent that to mis- 
construe one is to be misled concerning the others. The 
scope of human happiness is capable of such extension, 
the ground of it worthy of such deepening that one 
may find in the complete idea of enjoyment much that 
might seem to belong to the moral and metaphysical. 
Instead of operating apart from the feeling of joy, 
instead of postulating joy as the end of activity, the 
study of human work makes it necessary for us to 
assert that happiness is one of the essentials of work 
itself. We need not resort to biological considerations, 
and thus suggest that the tonic effects of pleasure as 
these are evinced by veins and muscles tend to connect 
energy with enjoyment ; in a freer fashion we may assert 
that happiness is the condition requisite for superior 
work. It is artistic enjoyment which furthers artistic 



290 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



endeavor; it is the joy of life which conditions the work 
of life. When happiness is thus understood as one of 
the essentials of fine activity, the importance of life- 
enjoyment will receive more recognition than is now 
accorded to it. 

In a similar manner, the feeling of joy serves as a 
criterion of truth. According to rationalism, truth is a 
formal matter whose essential nature is to be determined 
by the exacting conditions of the understanding; indi- 
vidualistic intellectualism, however, sees in truth some- 
thing more than abstract agreement of concept and con- 
cept. Where realism and pragmatism have sought to 
widen the sphere of truth by giving it more sensational 
and volitional content, they have not been careful to 
observe that eudaemonism claims a share of the intel- 
lectual labor of the mind, just as it demands a portion 
of truth's benefits. Truth exists, not alone for the 
understanding, but for the whole consciousness of man, 
and it is by means of truth that man is able to enjoy 
the world in which he is placed. Truth is indeed in- 
sight, but it is something more than this; it is appre- 
ciation, the aesthetic realization of the end of life. Such 
a eudaemonistic epistemology, while quite foreign to the 
methods of both realism and idealism, is not without its 
place in the larger plan of knowledge. If truth does not 
feel the need of the sense of happiness, the feeling of 
happiness can hardly be engendered and furthered apart 
from the sense of truth. This is not to assert that the 
supreme office of truth consists in pleasing the intellect; 
nevertheless, it seems impossible to assert that the office 
of truth has to do with nothing more than demonstra- 
tion. Truth convinces, but does not fail to please; it 
involves both demonstration and delight. That which 
happiness borrows from truth it repays when it serves 
as one of the criteria of verity; thus viewed, truth is 
known to the mind as that which, in addition to working 
more intellectual effects, satisfies the mind. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 291 

The mental danger which must attend such eudae- 
monism appears in the tendency of the over-solicitous 
self to isolate and contemplate only those ideas which 
seem joyful, so that the intellectual eudaemonist is ever 
on the brink of illusion. When the real world fails to 
supply the mind with enjoyable ideas, the eudaemonist 
is tempted to evoke notions of his own devising; and 
when the actual world of work fails to appoint the self 
to acceptable tasks, the individual is persuaded to busy 
himself with ideal activities whose genuineness and 
worth are often open to question. In this connection 
arises the ideal of art for its own sake; here also 
appears the ideal of happiness for its own sake, apart 
from sure basis which that happiness should have in the 
exterior order. Such happiness is thus in danger of 
hallucination. Where the activist may become so ab- 
sorbed in work as to lose all sense of the inner life, the 
eudaemonist may so surrender himself to his soul-states 
as to lose the frank meaning of life. In the midst of 
this peril, the individualist contends himself with the 
general principle that happiness should be a mental con- 
dition of which the self is directly conscious ; and it is 
only where the tendency of the social order persists in 
thrusting the individual out beyond himself that the 
morbid retreat to the inner life becomes, as it were, 
necessary. 

It is thus the failure of life to provide the individual 
with a place for enjoyment that has brought about the 
extra-eudaemonism peculiar to the individualism of the 
Decadent school. In his despair of finding joy in the 
social order, the individual has turned to himself with 
the hope of evoking within as self-conscious states that 
sense of life-joy which the organized world fails to 
supply. Unlike the ancient State and mediaeval Church, 
modern Society with all its exterior benefits has failed 
to supply the inner self with inspiration or enjoyment. 

19 



292 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



The perfection of the exterior order has been at the 
expense of interior life; and, in seeking the happiness 
of all, we have arrived at the happiness of none. The 
anti-social attitude of the individualist, while it tends to 
reveal itself in a negative manner as an opposition to 
established forms, is really an appeal for the inward 
realization of life as this comes, in part, from the 
inherent sense of life-joy. In itself, such Decadence 
may not be acceptable; but to criticize its methods is 
not to impugn its motives, which consist in a genuine 
desire to effect the inward realization of the self as that 
which has a worth of its own. Before a more accept- 
able life-ideal is to be formed, it becomes necessary to 
consider to what extent the sense of social dissatis- 
faction has led the modern individualist to postulate his 
own life as the end of all things ; then, a higher synthesis 
of selfhood and society may appear. 

2. The Individual as Decadent 

Since the joy of life, instead of being a gift from 
nature, is a goal toward which the individual must 
strive, and the attainment of which involves the supe- 
riorities of both intellect and will, the individual is in 
no mood to relinquish this acquired standpoint when the 
weight of social thinking and social living is brought to 
bear upon him. If happiness were a mere thing given 
by nature or provided by society, the contention for 
individualistic enjoyment could not be made so con- 
vincingly; but this happiness is the individual's own 
work, a work of internal art, so that no claims of medi- 
ocrity may argue against it with validity. To explain 
Decadence is easier than to justify it, but if one be 
disposed to frown upon the morbid and militant in 
human self -enjoyment, he must not overlook the fact 
that such Decadence is the direct product of our social- 
ized civilization. The individualist has done nothing 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 293 

worse than accept it as an expression of his inner life, 
as a means by which this inner life might be furthered. 
The original form of Decadence was purely aesthetical, 
having its roots in the depth of Romanticism; the more 
militant form of the cult, wherein Decadence became 
anti-social, was derivative and secondary. This is due 
to the fact that pure individualism seeks to ignore the 
social ; when such inward individualism assumes an 
attitude toward the exterior order of persons, it does 
so with less consistency than when it confines its atten- 
tion to itself. 

(1) The Aesthetic Form of Decadence 

As early as Schiller, the emancipation of the aesthetic 
ego was recognized as something necessary to the free 
development of the self. Indeed, one might also say 
that the first principles of the Kantian aesthetics had no 
other outcome, inasmuch as the Critique of Judgment 
was unable to elaborate the first principle of beauty 
without raising the aesthetical above the standards of 
truth and duty. In his search for the " disinterested," 
as that aesthetic pleasure which repudiates the interests 
of both sense and morality, Kant was practically antici- 
pating the Decadence of Baudelaire, which placed taste 
above the demands of la Verite and le Devoir. 1 Where 
Kant had applied his logic to the aesthetic idea as such, 
Schiller sought to deduce the fundamental principle of 
art as creative; this was done in connection with the 
idea of play, Spieltrieb. Upon this basis of free, in- 
ternal activity, Schiller concludes that the truth of 
human life is found in the ideal of play — Der Mensch 
soil mit der Schonheit nur spielen, und er soil nur mit 
der Schonheit spielen. 8 Where the moral demands duty, 
the social order work, the aesthetic order insists upon 
play; the place where the strain is felt to-day appears 

* Les Fleiirs du Mai, 1868, 23. a Werke, Hempel, XV, 392. 



294 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

less in connection with the ideal of duty, more with 
reference to the norm of utility. The aesthete, the 
Decadent, cannot submit to the utilitarian ideal, lest he 
lose the intrinsic meaning of his inner life. With the 
Romanticist, whose part in the elaboration of the indi- 
vidualistic ideal has already been recognized, Decadence 
showed itself in the ideal of subjective Ironie, as also 
in the striving after the striking, the piquant, and the 
remote; such tendencies were calculated to render man 
more and more individualistic, less and less social; more 
and more humanistic, less and less social. 

The aesthetic interpretation of Decadence should not 
be allowed to obscure the essential eudaemonism of the 
doctrine, even when certain objective features of the 
cult may seem to render it indifferent to this inner trait. 
According to Gautier, the meaning of Decadence resolved 
itself into a question of Latin literature, where such a 
Decadent as Baudelaire expressed a preference for such 
authors as Apuleius and Petronius, rather than for 
Vergil and Cicero ; the Latin thus exalted by the De- 
cadent also tended to be less Roman and more Byzan- 
tine, less Pagan and more Christian. The expressed 
reason for this strange choice appears in the fact that 
the language in its decadence has become mature, in- 
genious, complicated, wise, and full of nuances. Fur- 
thermore, it was the speckled, greenish elements of 
decomposition peculiar to late Roman and early Byzan- 
tine literature which made its appeal to Baudelaire; the 
deliquescence of ancient art thus made possible the 
Decadence of the modern. The internal character of 
this mature literature, with its superstitions and phan- 
toms, with its obscurities and monstrous dreams, made 
its appeal to the Decadent, who found in these anti- 
natural tendencies the possibility of interiorizing his 
individual life. Given natural notions and healthy 
ideals, and the intellect will stream outward in the pur- 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 295 

suit of the exterior object; involve the soul with the 
complications of its own nature, and it will find in the 
self abundant opportunity for its culte du moi. Now it 
was the love of the bizarre which Gautier employed in 
his explanation of the Decadence of Baudelaire. 9 

In the mind of Baudelaire himself, the decadent ideal 
expressed itself in connection with the principle of form, 
whence his art sought to compensate for its lack of the 
truthful and moral by a perfection of its own. This 
perfection, no longer a derivative perfection due to the 
subordination of the beautiful to the moralic or meta- 
physical, showed itself in the exactitude of the form 
which poetic composition followed, whence, not only 
the whole poem but the stanza, not only the stanza but 
the line, not merely the line but the word, should be 
perfect in itself. Only as poetic art was perfect in and 
through itself, one might imagine him to argue, could 
it afford to sever connection with the one-time assistance 
of the ethical and logical. At the same time, far from 
asserting that poetry could not elevate mankind morally, 
or that it could not enlighten the mind, Baudelaire went 
on to assert that such moral and mental benefits were 
essentially the result of perfect poetics ; the distinction 
between the poetic here and the mento-moral there was 
found in the idea that poetry benefits the true and the 
good incidentally, for the endeavor to make art submit 
to and serve morality and truth could only diminish the 
force of poetry. 10 

The aesthetic quality of Decadence expressed itself 
more uniquely when Baudelaire made use of the ex- 
pression, Vautonomie absolue de I'art. 11 The Kantian 
conception of aesthetics as disinterested pleasure is here 
extended in both directions, so that it shall include also 
disinterested pain; the aesthetical was thus the complete 
emancipation of the emotional process ; it was equally 

9 Les Fleurs du Mai, 17-18. ia Fleurs du Mai, 23. ^ lb., 21. 



296 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

disposed to the joyous and the sad, the beautiful and 
the ugly. It is true that the aestheticism of Baudelaire 
was inclined to emphasize the sad rather than the ugly, 
but the actual pursuit of his poetic themes did not fail 
to place the ugly by the side of the beautiful. Thus, in 
his Hymne a la Beaate, the poet is so anxious to gain 
insight into the inward infinite of his soul that he cares 
not whether the vision be from Heaven or Hell, whether 
it involve beauty alone or the monstrous and hideous. 12 
The categorical imperative of aesthetic Decadence ex- 
presses itself in Baudelaire's famous, Sois belle, et sois 
triste; 1S yet one cannot help asking why this command 
might not have read, Sois laide, et sois triste : ugliness 
seems to form the more appropriate partner for sadness, 
as the poet himself must have felt; for he adds that 
tears add as much to the countenance as the river to 
the landscape, and that the storm refreshes the flower. 
Moreover, in his choice of themes, where cats and ver- 
min become objects of poetic treatment, the poet seems 
inclined to exalt the ugly with the beautiful ; in this, the 
absolute autonomy of art is realized perfectly. 

The psychology of the aesthetic Decadence expresses 
a desire on the part of the poet to come to a full under- 
standing with his own soul. Decadent disinterestedness, 
whereby the artist repudiates goodness and truth and 
stands indifferently between beauty and ugliness, was 
evidently prompted by the desire to cut loose from the 
buoys of the soul in order that one might thus sink to 
the depths of one's uttermost self. At the time when 
Decadence was at its height, the psychology of the 
unconscious was in no such condition of perfection as 
it is now; and, in the abandonment of the usual criteria 
of consciousness, the moral will and the logical intellect, 
as these had been the guides of the Socratic " Know 
Thyself," Baudelaire was but seeking a kind and degree 

™Fleurs du Mai, XXII. u lb., XC. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 297 

of suignosis which should reveal, not only the superficial 
and usual, but the profound and extraordinary. To have 
followed a scientific and social standard would have been 
to defeat the psychological enterprise, so that the De- 
cadent has no other course than the aesthetic analysis 
of his own consciousness. How far such a method of 
interior living can remove one from the social order, 
appears in Huysmans and Wilde; from the ultimate 
results of Baudelairean aesthetic Decadence to the anti- 
social Decadence, the transition was immediate and plain. 

(2) The Anti-Social Character of Decadence 

The aesthetic interpretation of Decadence has the 
effect of revealing the struggle for an inner life, not so 
much in opposition to as in neglect of society; never- 
theless, the more militant form of the doctrine could 
not be avoided. Added to the analysis of Gautier, made 
in 1863, came the interpretation of Paul Bourget, in his 
Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, 1883 ; in the in- 
stance of Bourget, the analysis of Decadence is chiefly 
upon the basis of the social. " By the word Decadence," 
says he, " one denotes that state of society which pro- 
duces too large a number of individuals who are unfitted 
for the work of common life." 14 Following the prin- 
ciples of social biology and social evolution, Bourget 
looks upon the individual as a social cell, whose func- 
tioning in particular makes possible the functioning of 
the social organism in general. In the case of the indi- 
vidual, this self-functioning, carried on for the benefit 
of the whole organism, has about it the unhappy feature 
of causing the individual cell to express its energy in 
subordination to the energy of the social organism. 
When the individual, cellular energy becomes independ- 
ent, the tendency which is brought about is that of 
anarchy. Now it is the social organism itself, rather 

" Op. cit., 24. 



298 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

than the mere individual, which produces such anarchy; 
for development and decadence follow one and the same 
law. That is to say, while society is perfecting itself 
through culture and civilization, it is overdoing its 
work; whence the cultured, civilized individual makes 
his escape from the social organism which produced and 
perfected him. Such was the situation in the rise and 
fall of the Roman Empire. 

Like Baudelaire himself, Bourget seems " impassible " 
in the face of such destructive Decadence; better the 
decadent defeat of Athens than the violent triumph of 
Macedonia. 15 With his horror of progress and utopian- 
ism, Baudelaire found it impossible to turn Decadence 
into progress ; yet, this is not necessarily the attitude of 
all Decadents, still less is it the attitude of all individ- 
ualists. In the case of Wilde, who adopted the decadent 
ideals of Baudelaire and Huysmans, it was possible for 
the aesthetic individualist to raise himself above the 
passivistic condition into which aestheticism had thrown 
him, and turn from decadence to development, as this 
ideal appears in his The Soul of Man under Socialism. 
The same may be said of Nietzsche, who was more 
Baudelairean than he was willing to confess, so persist- 
ently did he strive to appear original. While Nietzsche 
had little of that Decadence which leads to passivism, 
he was an anti-social Decadent, who repudiated the con- 
ventional social morality of the day. Yet, while the 
Ubermensch, the Surhomme of Baudelaire, was usually 
regarded in the light of isolation, the supreme question 
of Nietzsche was, What kind of man is to succeed the 
man of contemporary civilization? With such Deca- 
dents as Wilde and Nietzsche, there is somewhat more 
than a criticism of the present, more than a laudation 
of the Hellenic past ; there is the promise of the future. 
Bourget seems to dread the futuristic consideration be- 

18 Op. cit., 28. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 299 

cause, in history, declining civilizations have been fol- 
lowed in the name of progress by periods of brutality; 
but, in the case of our conscious, our willed Decadence, 
does it follow that the barbaric and brutal will efface 
our present civilization? 

In considering such a possibility, the futurist would 
defend his argument by calling attention to the fact that 
our Decadence, far from being an affair thoroughly 
social, is more definitely confined to a certain class of 
individuals. In the mind of Nordau, the situation seems 
to assume a character according to which the socialized 
mass of men with their scientific education is sound; 
Decadence is limited to a part of the cultured class. 
While we as individualists may not be so ready to admit 
the social security of the mass, we are pleased to admit 
that Decadence appears as something specific and tem- 
porary, while it has about it the definite mark of that 
individualism which the author of Degeneration called 
" Ego-mania" ; now such an amiable madness is not 
likely to become universal. As far as the barbaric is 
concerned, we may gather from Nietzsche that it is the 
isolated superman who is to elaborate such a character 
for himself, not that the present is to be followed by 
barbarism as an epoch. Nietzsche welcomed the sug- 
gestion of the titanic and barbaric, not as this appeared 
in mankind as a whole, but as it forced itself through 
our civilization in such instances as that of Wagner's 
opera, where Siegfried stood out in contrast to the im- 
personal men of his day and generation. It is thus an 
individualized, not a socialized, Decadence which pre- 
sents the problem for contemporary thought, while in- 
stead of the tendency to become more robust and bar- 
baric, the most marked social tendencies incline toward 
the mild and rational. 

Because of the individualism of Decadence, in the 
light of which the self is willed as an object in itself, 



300 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



individualism is inclined to accord limited, qualified 
approval to the movement which has tended to rescue 
the inner life of a socialized mankind. Baudelaire was 
malignant, but was Darwin of greater value to the spirit- 
ual life of humanity? Nietzsche had been a scourge to 
an age unprepared for a x violent individualism, but was 
the agnosticism of Spencer any more acceptable? May 
we not thus regard Decadence as the antidote for the 
vicious naturalism and sociality of the last generation, 
and may we not find in such Decadence as much as we 
thought to find in evolution? If we were ready to sink 
beneath good and evil, should we hesitate to rise beyond 
good and evil? If man allowed evolution to relate him 
to the ape, could he not look in the other direction and 
thus permit the Decadent to point out his affinity for 
the superman? Evolution itself is not so surrendered 
to the massive and generic that it cannot make room for 
the individualistic in animal existence; for, as Darwin 
observed, " Individual differences are of the highest 
importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must 
be familiar to every one; and they thus afford materials 
for natural selection to work upon." 16 The decadent 
individual was certainly a deviation from the social type, 
so that in him there may be the possibility of a future 
man who will have the advantage of self-knowledge and 
a comprehension of the world in which he finds himself. 
In seeking to align a goal for mankind, individualism 
does not hesitate to postulate an individual as an " I 
am " and " I will," while it is dismayed at discovering 
how stolidly social thought aims at a congregation of 
well-fed, socially satisfied bipeds, whose life is almost 
altogether one of immediacy and exteriority. 

Where historical Decadence could express this liber- 
ation of the inner life in no more serious manner than 
by postulating a creature who " plays " or who " poet- 

13 Origin of Species, Ch. II. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 301 

izes," individualism sees in Decadence the possibility of 
employing the emancipation of humanity from the sci- 
entific and the social to the end of creating a being who 
comprehends the world, while he enjoys the happiness 
which this enlightenment brings, and pursues his intel- 
ligible endeavor. In deviating from the social type, the 
individualist sets up the ideal of man as one who knows 
who he is and what he is doing; industrial occupation 
and social service have no other effect than the per- 
petuation of a social machine which produces unintelli- 
gible results, whose work makes for a wearisome exteri- 
ority wholly alien to the free, internal life of man as 
such. Genuine thinking, genuine doing are thus the 
prerogatives of the " man " whom society would include 
within its realm ; but, when this " man " is once social- 
ized, his spontaneous thinking and doing are fatally 
limited. Against such a dwarfing of man, Decadence 
is a strong protest, however extreme may be the indi- 
vidualism which it proposes, however perverse the con- 
tent of inner life which it would ascribe to man. Man 
cannot lose the meaning of life for the sake of making 
himself efficient; man dare not forego the enjoyment of 
his inward existence for the purpose of increasing his 
usefulness. Only as man is ego can he really serve the 
social order in which he finds himself; only as he says, 
" I am," can he say, " Society is." 

That which society denies the individual is that par- 
ticipation in the world where he is supposed to work; 
man is in, but is not of, the order which surrounds him. 
Social life is exterior, energistic, not interior and intel- 
ligible. The method by which participation becomes 
possible to the free individual living and working within 
the social order, is of a twofold character: it consists 
of enjoyment and insight. Man does not suffer merely 
because he does not possess property, nor does he have 
happiness merely because he can call a certain amount 



302 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



of goods his own. Happiness and misery are internal 
and personal in their character. To participate in the 
social order by means of the enjoyment of existence is 
an idea which makes necessary a more complete philos- 
ophy of eudaemonism than the ideal of the " greatest 
happiness of the greatest number " can convey, while 
it is even farther removed from the more " scientific " 
conception of " social health." Such social ideals might 
indicate a certain degree of contentment due to external 
welfare, but they do not penetrate to the depths of the 
individual's nature. The sense of happiness in the light 
of which man participates in his social world involves 
self-consciousness within and a complete view of the 
social world in which one seeks his life-enjoyment; 
man may be free from pain, may find entertainment in 
life, but his happiness is a positive condition in which 
he as himself enjoys his existence. Social thought has 
attempted to construe happiness as something external 
in the form of the means of enjoyment ; egoistic think- 
ing, in its despair of finding happiness in the world, has 
attempted to place enjoyment in the individual as one 
separated from the world. Both forms of hedonism 
have failed to present the eudaemonistic problem ; both 
have failed to satisfy the human soul. Happiness is 
neither objective nor subjective ; it consists in the free 
participation of the individual in his human world, which 
otherwise will remain an obstacle to his self-expression. 
Owing to our hedonistic prejudices, according to 
which some are in favor of pleasure as the life-goal 
while others are opposed to it, the ideal of human 
happiness has been lost to view. Instead of regarding 
happiness as the complete enjo)mient of the unified self, 
both hedonism and rigorism have considered it as the 
mere functioning of man's emotional nature. Further- 
more, happiness has been regarded in a static manner 
as something given in the world or found in the mind. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 303 

Eudaemonism, however, looks upon happiness as a 
spontaneous form of activity manifested by the soul in 
its endeavor to overcome obstacles. Thus understood, 
happiness is equivalent to an inward sense of power 
which completes itself in the sense of overcoming. To 
exist as ego and to express the meaning of the inner 
life is to have happiness as such. To be immediately at 
home in the social order may impart a sense of ataraxy, 
while to strive within when there is no opportunity of 
finding self-expression without is the delicious sense of 
suffering of which only the man of genius is capable. 
A fully organized soul sustaining representative relations 
with the world without, presents the perfect type of the 
happy man, a type which unfortunately has few examples 
to corroborate it. 

Granting that man may be great, as perhaps we are 
not forced to assume, it may be said that such life- 
greatness consists in the experience of a happiness which 
makes man one with the world. Egoism is to be under- 
stood as an effort to construct life under the form of a 
greatness which is impossible as long as the individual 
is submerged in the social order. Religion is perhaps 
the most stupendous attempt to attribute to the soul the 
idea of greatness which both the natural and the social 
are constrained to deny. Art is only another means of 
laying claim to that sense of life-greatness which the 
uncultivated existence of the social man dares not boast. 
Over and above all the necessary pettiness of life, which 
is due to the existence of man in nature and his work 
in the world, there is a presentiment of grandeur which 
becomes plausible only as the aesthetic character of 
life receives due emphasis. Culture is thus the general 
atmosphere in which the ideal of human greatness can 
thrive. Social existence, which to the average man 
seems the goal of life, is but a means to the aesthetic 
end. Eudaemonism, as this is sought in life, is the 
eudaemonism of aesthetic culture. 



3 04 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

II. LIFE THE PLACE OF VALUES 
Will the social order be found to do more for man 
as the creator of values than it did for man as the 
creature of joys; or, having flayed with whips, will it 
now flay with scorpions? Where human sensitivity led 
the individual to look for the social objectifi cation of 
life's joy, his sense of spontaneity now leads him to 
appeal to the social order for the conservation of indi- 
vidual values. From the social standpoint, the demand 
for life-values seems more plausible than the demand 
for life-joys; for such is the common conception of the 
State that society is par excellence the realm of human 
values. The idea of worth seems more mediocre than 
that of either joy or truth, so that the social order can 
appear to be the realm of values where it is not at the 
same time the realm of joy and truth. Yet it may 
appear that the individualistic sense of worth is some- 
thing so akin to the ideals of joy and truth that the 
State shall become as little the home of values as it was 
found to be the home of human joys. Society has a 
way of casting the ego about from place to place, 
whether in the caste-system of Brahmanism, the class- 
notion of Platonism, or the modern class-arrangement 
of society, that individualism may be led to doubt the 
validity of the State as the conserver of human values. 
It may be that the social order is speaking of values as 
though they were more like objective things than like 
states of the human will, in which case the fate of 
human value will perhaps turn out to be in no wise 
different from that of human joy. Thus, there may be 
as little room for a Nietzsche as there was for a Baude- 
laire. To investigate the situation, one must subject the 
concept of worth to analysis. 

i. The Humanistic Nature oe Value 
In his persistent endeavor to construe his life as great, 
man has made use of one moral ideal after another, as 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 305 

the conditions of culture varied. Where for a consid- 
erable period of time the ideal of the good obtained and 
served further to express the goal of human life, the 
lack of initiative peculiar to such a static notion effected 
a change to the modern ideal of duty. Where the good 
was fixed and limited, duty has become dynamic and 
endless, whence there has arisen a desire to possess a 
moral ideal which, while not solid like the ancient good, 
should be less fluid than the modern duty. That con- 
cept of life which seems to be clay instead of either 
marble or water, is found in the plastic notion of value. 
Metaphysically considered, value represents neither that 
which is eternally complete nor that which must remain 
forever incomplete; in this mingling of the eternal and 
the temporal, the concept value shows its likeness to 
human nature as such. For the more perfect compre- 
hension of the value-principle, it were well to observe 
how, as a doctrine of desire, value teaches the individual 
how to receive from the world, and how, as a doctrine 
of volition, the same principle shows man how he can 
put his will into the world. 

(1) Value and Desire 

In the attempt to look upon man as great, philosophy 
of life must needs settle accounts with that most char- 
acteristic of human tendencies known as desire. Where 
a severely spiritual conception of life's greatness, as this 
appears in the Buddhistic religion, feels constrained to 
negate desire, the looser and less religious view ever 
tends to affirm desire as that which is natural and 
worthy. Somewhere between the mere negation and 
sheer affirmation of desire will the worth and greatness 
of life be found : the relation between desire and value, 
inasmuch as each helps the other to attain to intelligi- 
bility and security. If it were not for desire, the idea 
of value would be almost without content, while the 



306 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

presence of value in desire redeems desire from psycho- 
logical contradiction. It may be possible to gain some 
insight into the character of value by making simple 
appeal to pleasure; but so passive is pleasure, so tem- 
porary, that the flow of life must depend upon some 
more constant life-principle, such as is found in desire. 
Again, it might be possible to view value in terms of 
volition ; but the resort to sheer volition, while it may 
account for action as such, fails to color such action 
with the character of worth. For these reasons, it seems 
better to consider value as something desiderative. 

The analysis of desire is sure to disappoint him who 
persists in a purely hedonic interpretation of this com- 
bination of impulse and feeling. Desire is not feeling 
alone, not willing alone, but a fusion of the two. On 
this account, one's desires may be directed toward that 
which is pleasurable, a form of desire which tends to 
emphasize the affective phase of the desiderative; yet, 
this is not to indulge in the hedonic assertion that man 
always desires pleasure. At the other extreme of the 
desiderative series, one discovers that desire may direct 
its forces toward that which is painful, a psychological 
phenomenon which is sure to puzzle the naive hedonist. 
Then, as a mean between these extremes, desire may so 
merge feeling into volition that the desired object shall 
be neutral as to both pain and pleasure. In these three 
phases of desire, where pleasure is marked plus, minus, 
and plus or minus, some extra-hedonic principle is obvi- 
ously at work ; this principle is that of value. The indi- 
vidual desires a pleasurable object, not merely because 
it is pleasurable, but because the pleasure involved is 
the sign of that object's worth. When, at the other 
extreme, the individual is found desiring a painful ob- 
ject, the rationale of the desire is found in the fact that 
the object is judged to have value for him who, in spite 
of pain, makes it the object of his volition. In the 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 307 

principle of value, then, desire finds the basis which is 
lacking in all hedonic attempts to ground the desider- 
ative. 

The service which the principle of value grants to 
desire is reciprocated by desire when one makes the 
attempt to supply value with a content ; ethics has helped 
psychology, and psychology shall help ethics. To view 
value as something desiderative, it becomes necessary to 
cast the general principle of value into the form of a 
judgment, wherein value becomes the predicate without 
which the moral idea would end in a circular form of 
argument. But, in making of value a value- judgment, 
the raw, psychological material is called upon to assume 
a quasi-idealistic character, whence mere desire is trans- 
formed into that which is judged desirable. With the 
imperfection of the individual, the insistence upon that 
which is judged desirable may often appear rigoristic, 
as though one were to command that which in itself is 
good for or desirable for man. Such idealization and 
such an imperative, however, are due to the irrational 
character of the individual rather than to any imper- 
fection in the ethical principle as such; and it is further 
to be said that, had we to deal with man as truly human, 
the natural desires of the heart would lead to nothing 
else than that which, in a purely moralic manner, is 
called rectitude or duty. The valuable is thus the desir- 
able ; and, while the empirical individual has not the 
reasonableness necessary for the instinctive pursuit of 
such a desiderative value, it is possible to judge that 
such is at heart the intuitive choice of the humanity 
within the individual. 

While the valuable as the desiderative does not make 
human life perfect and joyous, the principle of desider- 
ative value has the effect of removing from one's mind 
the contradictions incident upon a conservatively au- 
tonomous moral judgment, in the pale light of which it 



20 



308 the ground and goal of human life 

is asserted that " right is right." Of this identical judg- 
ment there can be no doubt, but the practical sufficiency 
of the ideal involved occasions a certain amount of prac- 
tical skepticism. Has the right no worth? Is morality 
all in vain? When the anxious moralist casts about for 
some predicate to take the place of the formal " right," 
he considers with dismay how insufficient is such a 
predicate as " useful," how unconvincing is the attri- 
bute " pleasurable " ; then it is that the predicate value 
comes to satisfy both the logical demands for a synthetic 
judgment and the ethical needs of a predicate which 
shall have sufficient moral dignity to place itself along 
side the right, or virtue. Thus completed, the ethical 
judgment stands, " Virtue is that which has value." 

In such a predicate as value, the ground of moral 
judgment appears to be found; more than this, which 
is quite formal in its character, is the thought that the 
predicate " value " is able to supply the moral will with 
a sufficient motive for obeying the dictates of the moral 
law, for that law is but the expression of that which 
has intrinsic worth for man. To will the moral simply 
for the sake of so willing is something which is so lack- 
ing in humanism as to engender practical skepticism; 
such morality asks too much of man. To will morality 
because such willing brings pleasure, apart from the 
reckless optimism involved therein, seems unworthy of 
the individual, who feels that such a morale asks too 
little. But to will such virtues as seem to contain so 
many values is a course of morality which should sat- 
isfy both the ardent humanist and the rigorous moralist. 
At the same time, the pursuit of that which has worth 
tends to further the individualistic assumption that man 
is great. Toward this idea of greatness, or worth, the 
natural order is necessarily neutral; in nature there can 
be no idea of greatness save, perhaps, that of limitless- 
ness and power, but the purely spatial and dynamic 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 309 

cannot have a value for the human species. It is in the 
humanistic order, then, that the problem of value is to 
be discussed, so that the conflict over the conservation 
of value has to do with the social situation in which 
the individual finds himself. Instead of being a world 
of values, a place of worth, society is the place where 
human affairs as such are transacted. In the midst of 
this, man must still be regarded as the valuing being, 
a unique species in the natural order of creation. 

For the furtherance of the value-ideal, humanity has 
at its side the forces of art and religion, while the 
inferior valuations of the mediocre life find their ex- 
pression in ethics and economics. Art is of vast moment 
in the elaboration of the value-ideal, inasmuch as the 
aesthetic consciousness arouses spontaneous activities in 
the artist while it does not fail to create ideal desires in 
the beholder of the artist's work. It is undeniable that, 
feeling its independence of the social standard, art may 
indulge the excesses of the Roccoco and the Romantic ; 
but these aberrations have the advantage of revealing 
the free creativeness of the human spirit. Where soci- 
ety has been genuine, these extremes have been avoided, 
so that they are as much to the discredit of the social 
as of the individualistic. In a similar manner, religion 
has ever affirmed the supremacy of the human spirit; 
and, while it has not shunned social service, it has never 
created the illusion that its divine ideals came into being 
for the sole purpose of smoothing the path of civiliz- 
ation. Like art, religion has had its spiritual excesses, 
whence its history is marked by the presence of the 
sacerdotal and superstitious, whose existence is so ob- 
noxious to the utilitarian mind. In all this, it has been 
the peculiar vocation of the aesthetic and religious to 
conserve the unique sense of worth which it is the des- 
tiny of mankind to enjoy; and, without the tendency to 
appreciate and to worship, it had been difficult for man 
to have kept his human values. 



310 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

With the ethical and economic forms of human con- 
sciousness, wherein the ideas of man as worker have 
ever obtained, the sense of value has not fared so well. 
Both of these forms of human culture have pledged 
themselves to the social, rather than to the individual- 
istic, whereby the interior feeling for life has been 
threatened. It is quite true that man is by nature 
active, that man has a work in the world; but the ques- 
tion is, What is the nature of the task that he is sup- 
posed to perform? The categorical imperative of ethics 
and economics is, Man shall act ; the aesthetic imperative 
is, Man shall play. Which is right, Kant or Schiller? 
In which mood do we find man as such, in the moralistic, 
or the artistic? The economic consciousness, which is 
so insistent to-day, is more inimical to individualism 
than the ethical ever was; now it is declared that the 
value of life consists, not in work alone, but in a kind 
of work which has as its end an immediate object and 
a direct result. 

According to individualism, it is the calling of man 
to get value out of the world. The perceptual activity 
of the poet, or " maker," the intuitive conduct of the 
seer, and the assimilative consciousness of man as hu- 
man, give us examples of the manner according to which 
the human valeur works upon the world. Even from 
the purely economic point of view, where " value " 
assumes a specifically material form, the same spiritual 
activity is suggested ; hence the picture of the " labor 
process " as depicted by Marx : " Living labor must 
seize upon things and rouse them from their death- 
sleep, change them from mere possible use-values into 
real and effective ones. Bathed in the fire of labor, 
appropriated as part and parcel of labor's organism, and, 
as it were, made alive for the performance of their 
functions in the process, they are in truth consumed, 
but consumed with a purpose, as elementary constituents 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 311 

of new use-values." 1T The conditions under which 
values are most perfectly realizable are for the economist 
to determine; here, where we are in position to judge 
concerning the merits of capitalism and socialism, we 
must content ourselves with the idealistic assertion that 
no social system can hope to represent humanity or 
satisfy its desires, unless that system keep in mind the 
valuational principle which lies at the foundation of 
human life in the world. 

(2) Values as Volitional 
The art of getting value out of the world appears, 
then, to be nothing more than putting the human will 
into the world; for this reason, value is as volitional 
as it is humanistic. To the credit of individualism, it 
must be said that the idea of the world of values was 
deduced in connection with the idea of man as an indi- 
vidual, for only as man premised an ego within was he 
able to postulate a value without. The august sense of 
this relation of man to world has never received a more 
striking or more convincing representation than it re- 
ceived in the supreme sentence of Christianity : What 
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose 
his own soul? Here, the world and the self are placed 
in opposition, just as thought and thing were set tete- 
a-tete in the logic of Platonism; but, here in Christian- 
ity, it was the inner will in its attempt to get values out 
of the world which was set in opposition to the world- 
whole. Christianity does not seem to oppose the indi- 
vidual's attempt to overcome the world; all that Chris- 
tianity insists upon is that, in getting worth out of things, 
the individual must not forfeit his unique self. At any 
rate, the idea of gaining the world, of securing the 
world's value, must be attributed to the genius of the 
Christian religion, where outer worth and inner indi- 
viduality are set upon opposite sides of the whole science 
of things. 

w Capital, tr. Moore and Aveling, 162-163. 



312 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



In the attempt to assign to the will a work in the 
world, individualism has settled upon the idea of worth 
as that which expresses the essence of the individual's 
wo rid- work. But can this volitional benefit be enjoyed 
by the thinker unless he continue to assume the place of 
the intellect in the world of forms, whence springs the 
idea of truth? In the career of recent Humanism, this 
confusion between value and truth has placed thought 
in a position where, instead of indulging in the temper- 
ately humanistic idea that truth has value, it fain would 
assert that truth is value. The exaggerations of human- 
ism, as these appear in Dewey and Schiller, may per- 
haps be explained when one recalls how the elder ration- 
alism made the mere verity of the true the sole object 
of its pursuit, the sole conclusion to its arguments. 
Individualism, which finds the full sense of inner life 
to consist of joy, worth, and truth, is free from the 
formal rationalism which, in asserting that truth was 
simply true, failed to observe that truth was also joyful 
and worthful; but this does justify the humanist in his 
counter assertion that in being thus joyful and worthful, 
true is no longer true. 

To assert, however, that the world of truths is not 
independent of the world of values, is not to admit that 
the world of values can take the place of the world of 
truths. Lotze, who did not fail to indicate practically 
all that is to be found in current Humanism, was so 
impressed with the fact that the basis of metaphysics is 
to be found in ethics, that he felt it his duty to free the 
subordinated world of values from the world of forms ; 
yet, the valuational philosophy of Lotze involves no 
such sacrifice of intellect as its humanistic child seems 
so ready to make. Now, to realize the important work 
of the will in the elaboration of the worth-world, it is 
necessary to observe that even the newly emancipated 
will of voluntarism and Humanism has its limits ; the 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 313 

will is not unlike the " master " spoken of by Goethe ; 
it shows itself only within " limitations." Individual- 
ism asserts these limitations to be those of value; and, 
if the will can affirm values, and can affirm them so 
successfully that there shall be no dread of nihilism, it 
may congratulate itself, and may further rejoice in the 
fact that it was the world of values alone, not the world 
of truths also, which was alloted to it as its share of 
work in the world. 

In the process of getting value from the world, man 
develops his value-making will as well as the material 
upon which his activities are concentrated. Not a little 
of this humanistic development of man finds expression 
in another selection from Capital: 

Man opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces, 
setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural 
forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions 
in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the 
external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his 
own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels 
them to act in obedience to his sway. 18 

This humanistic activity carries with it the idea of value, 
since man acts in response to conscious desire, while the 
method of his work is characterized by the application 
of intellect to activity. Thus the end sought and the 
means employed are man's own; they transcend nature 
in the way that man's own being is destined to transcend 
the material order, and thus establish the kingdom of 
value upon the earth. Apart from this idea of man as 
valuer and society as the place of values, man's life in 
the world were a mere plant-like existence in which the 
natural forces of earth should find only one among many 
forms of expression; but with the idea of man as self- 
centered worker, the inner life takes on a unique char- 
acter, while the human world becomes a specific creation 
of the human will. The world itself cannot be esteemed 
the place of value; the place of value is a realm which 

u 0p. cit., 156-157. 



3U 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



man has created of his own powers and for his own 
purposes. Where the individual thinks to see the pos- 
sibility of elaborating values in life, he is justified in 
assuming an optimistic life-ideal ; where, however, he 
sees no outlet for his inward energy, where social life 
appears to afford no opportunity for self-expression, his 
attitude is justly pessimistic. Now the argument against 
pessimism is one which is offered by the will ; pessimism 
is passivistic, if not nihilistic. 

Over and above these economic values which repre- 
sent so characteristically the work of the will in the 
world, there are ethical worths which have sprung from 
the will of mankind. Humanism expects man to will 
all, the speculative and the practical, the truths of logic 
and the ideals of ethics ; being that which man has 
made, and still is making. But the willing of values 
into being, the attempt to give character as well as to 
find essence in the world, presents a task which only 
individualism knows how to appreciate. Individualism 
is not reluctant to appoint the will to the office of valuer 
in the world, even when individualism knows that the 
most determined, the most intelligent acts of the will 
find it difficult to escape a nihilism which seems to be 
inherent in them. The work of the will as moral valuer 
appears in connection with sense and intellect, as also 
with reference to the will itself. With sense, man wills 
his happiness, and individualism knows full well that 
happiness, instead of being a given somewhat to be 
found in the world, is a creation of the improvising will 
of the self. The work of the will appears again in an 
operation whereby ideas in the abstract are turned into 
living ideals. At the same time, the will wills itself. 

The volitional value which the will attributes to sense 
has in it the very essence of eudaemonism ; between the 
self as that which desires to enjoy life as such and sense 
which seems to promise this happiness, the will spans a 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 315 

bridge. In such volitional eudaemonism, one of the 
chief characteristics of the world of values is found. 
In the attempt to find enjoyment in life, the self may 
be tempted to follow an ancient hedonism according to 
which happiness is sought in the passing pleasure of the 
moment ; such was the method of the Cyrenaic. Or the 
ego, distrustful of the momentary, periodic pleasure, 
may attempt the intellectual summation of such pleasure 
in the form of the hedonic calculus. Now the history 
of hedonism has shown us that neither in the single 
pleasure of sense nor in the summed-up pleasure of a 
manifold of pleasant experiences is happiness as such 
to be found. For this reason, eudaemonism has found 
it expedient to turn to the will, whence happiness has 
come to be regarded as a willed happiness, a creation 
of the ego's own. In such willed or created happiness, 
the work of valuation has found a characteristic expres- 
sion ; the life of man as social has thus assumed, in idea 
at least, the form of a place of joys. Now these joys 
are more than feelings appreciated by the senses; they 
are the overcome standpoints of the active, creative will ; 
they are, therefore, examples of the social life of man 
as a world of values. 

Volitional values as produced by the action of the 
will upon the intellect assume the character of ideals, 
or intellectual values of humanity. In the system of 
Plato, where the elaboration of a world of Ideas was 
the end sought by the thinker, the conceptual work of 
the understanding was ever accompanied by the valu- 
ational work of the will, although Platonism was far 
from presenting a just balance of the intellectualistic 
and voluntaristic. The Ideas are mentally complete for 
the intellect, morally perfect for the will ; they stand for 
the truth and worth of life. In our social thinking, we 
make the evaluating of ideas a most difficult thing, since 
we seek to decide all moral valuations by means of con- 



3 i6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN UFE 

vention; nevertheless, the will still has authority to take 
the ideas of the intellect and characterize them accord- 
ing to the principle of worth. At any rate, this is the 
psychology of -yalue, so far as the intellect is concerned; 
value is the idea as willed, and in the act of willing, the 
idea receives the attribute of worth, as in the act of 
thinking it receives the quality of truth. 

As the will affirms sense and thus creates happiness, 
as it asserts the idea and thus creates worth, so it asserts 
itself as such, and thus makes the work of valuation a 
complete one. While the position in which an assertion 
places one may seem absurd, the study of nihilism which 
must follow this view of the value-problem will show 
us that the pessimistic act of negation arises, not merely 
when the individual fails to find joy in life, whence he 
tends to become a eudaemonistic pessimist, not merely 
when his intellect fails to assert truth in the world, 
whence his pessimism becomes cosmic ; pessimistic nega- 
tion concerns itself with nothing so much as the asser- 
tion of the will as such. When man cannot will his 
volitions, he becomes pessimist, nihilist. For this rea- 
son, it becomes necessary to emphasize the fact that the 
view of society as a world of values, depending as this 
does upon the volition of sense and intellect, is further 
dependent upon the assertion of volition as such. In 
order that life may have worth, man must will; if man 
refrain from willing, if he assume nihilism and thus 
negate the will, the worth of life is gone. The worth 
of life cannot be postulated as a solid somewhat inde- 
pendent of the affirming intellect of man; the worth of 
life is a willed worth, a created worth, and it is depend- 
ent upon the will as will, not merely the will as it ex- 
presses itself through sensation and ideation. 

In this capacity of valuer, man comes upon the social 
scene, where all worths are organized according to cus- 
tom, where values obtain, not </>uW, but Beau; worths 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 317 

are not unlike the " ghosts " of Ibsenism, the inherited 
values which cannot be discarded by contemporary man ; 
society itself is not altogether different from the Spuk 
so thoroughly reviled by Stirner. On this account, it 
becomes necessary for individualism to observe the 
manner in which man has repudiated his own values, 
how from having the will to create them, he has ad- 
vanced to the will to destroy them. This appears in 
nihilism and pessimism, whose secret is found in the 
uncertainty of the will- 
When values are regarded as so many idealized de- 
sires, it becomes possible for the individual to come to 
some conclusion concerning the ultimate issues of life 
in the world. Does human life make for success or 
failure? This question, so time-honored and so baffling, 
takes on a new form when one re-casts the principles 
of life upon the basis of value. Where one's ethics is 
hedonic, he must prove that man's life, if it is to be 
esteemed successful, must be a happy one, a conclusion 
which even the most optimistic are unwilling to draw. 
Where one's ethics is rigoristic, he must conclude that 
the success of life depends upon one's ability to show 
that man is good, a conclusion which moralic pessimism 
is ever ready to set aside. But, where one's ethics is 
that of the value- judgment, his only question is this, 
Has man been able to get value out of his life? To 
this third interrogative, the answer need not be in the 
same negative which beset eudaemonism and moralism, 
since man is and ever has been securing values where 
he has not been able either to gather pleasures or to 
elaborate virtues. Man has of course enjoyed some 
happiness just as he has performed a certain amount 
of duty, but in comparison with the vast values known 
to his art, his morality, and his religion, these hedonic 
and moralic claims seem quite insignificant. As a 
hedonist, man has not been a success; as a moralist, 



3 i8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

he has been even more of a failure; but as humanist, 
or valuer, man has achieved a success with which other 
ethical triumphs cannot for a moment compare. Where 
the historical mementos of both pleasure and virtue are 
scarce to be found, the memory of human values jus- 
tifies the assumption that man has conserved value in 
life; for which reason, the history of humanity, rather 
than a history of pleasure or a history of virtue, is the 
history of human values. 

2. The Individual as Pessimist 
In order to clear itself of the charge of complete, 
unqualified anti-sociality, individualism sets up such 
ideals of society as seem to promise an exterior life 
for a humanity wherein the one thing needful is interior 
existence. Where this interiority is conceived eudae- 
monistically, society becomes the place of joys, and 
where society fails to assume such a character, indi- 
vidualism becomes Decadence. In connection with the 
present topic, where the will of the individual seeks 
self-expression, the social order is regarded ideally as 
a world of values ; but, once the real social order is so 
far this ideal, the individual is driven to the position of 
pessimism. At heart, this social pessimism is dependent 
upon the thought that man has no work in the world, 
no opportunity to express that which is most character- 
istic about him. When such pessimistic suspicion in- 
vades the will, the individual resorts to a pessimism 
which, at first, assumes the character of nihilism, then 
becomes more threatening as a doctrine of destructive 
pessimism as such. 

(i) Pessimism as Nihilism 
It is individualism as such which reveals the pathos 
of a human life in which the ideals of interior existence 
cannot adjust themselves to the actual conditions of the 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 319 

exterior order. This dualism of inner and outer may 
be attributed as the cause of such a tragedy as that of 
the Antigone of Sophocles ; but that which was lacking 
there was the definitely personal element in the char- 
acter of the ancient heroine, who was fated to feel the 
contrast between an inner law and an outer statute. 
In the case of Flaubert's Emma Bovary, it is the per- 
sonal within and the social without which arouse the 
conflict, which involve the nihilism of the author. In 
the case of Flaubert, both Bourget 19 and Huneker 
assert that it was the disproportion between inner life 
and outer existence which led to the intellectual nihilism 
of the philosophic litterateur. The point at which this 
nihilism is felt is the will ; the intellectual nihilist finds 
it most easy to think, but correspondingly difficult to 
initiate action. 

According to Bourget's interpretation of Flaubert's 
nihilism, the cause of the malady is to be found in the 
fatigue, the exhaustion of our civilization, where there 
is not sufficient vigor to call forth the energy of the 
soul within. Yet the nihilism peculiar to Flaubert is 
none the less attributable to the feebleness of the inward 
will, which has exhausted itself in passive thinking. 
Man seems almost Faust-like in the intellectual isolation 
from the world, while his volitional feebleness is due, 
not to age alone, but to lack of volitional exercise. 
From the social standpoint, it may be urged, as is done 
by Bourget, that the richness of the intellect is the 
poverty of the will; for the abundance of interests 
incident upon the variety of points of view results in 
the impotence of man's volitional nature. Bourget's 
own nihilism appears in his attitude toward the human 
intellect, which he seems to regard as a faculty more 
destructive than constructive, while he looks upon man 
as one who " plays with thought, as an infant plays 

19 Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, 139. 



320 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



with poison." 20 This abuse of the brain appears to 
him to be the great malady of the day: its effect is 
felt by the will, which is enfeebled by too much thought. 

In connection with the Bovaryism of Flaubert, it is 
a question whether one may interpret that term, or 
develop that philosophy, after the manner of intellectual 
nihilism; nevertheless, there are not wanting in the 
history of Madame Bovary certain traits of character 
which submit to the interpretation of a nihilism due to 
an excess of interior sentiment. The intellect may in- 
deed be guilty of isolating the individual from the world, 
but from this it does not follow that the individual 
should abandon his intellect for the sake of social life; 
just as reasonable, and more worthy, is it to assume that 
social life should be conceived and conducted in such a 
way as to make possible the participation of the indi- 
vidual with the richness of his interior, intellectual 
existence. 

In the deduction of his Bovaryism, Flaubert does not 
fail to emphasize the fact that Emma Bovary's inner 
life had been built up upon the foundation of romantic 
books; she lived in the society of Mary Stuart, Joan 
of Arc, Eloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, 
and the like. In her eudaemonism, Emma sought to 
find out in life what the literary terms, " felicity, pas- 
sion, rapture," might mean. 21 To her inability to har- 
monize the romantic dream within with the realistic 
world without, the author attributes her failure in life. 
" Busy " reading her novels, Emma brought down upon 
her head the following bit of criticism: "She needs 
to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. 
If she were obliged to live like so many others, to earn 
her own living, she would not have these vapors, that 
come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, 

211 Op. cit., 154. 

23 Madame Bovary, Pt. I, V. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 321 

and from the idleness in which she lives." 22 According 
to Bourget, this abuse of the brain was the one theme 
with Flaubert. Saint Anthony had thought too deeply 
about his Christ; Bouvard and Pecuchet had thought 
too much about their theories ; Madame Bovary had 
thought too much, a trop pense, about her happiness. 23 

Flaubert seeks an equilibrium when he introduces 
into the work the all-practical Homais, the most sym- 
metrical character in the book. Homais' advice to 
Emma's lover, Leon, who had complained against life, 
is all but comparable to Voltaire's, One must cultivate 
the garden : " If I were you, I would have a lathe." 24 
The conflict between the two ideals of life, the internal 
and romantic, the external and practical, is brought 
before the heroine when she attends the famous agri- 
cultural show. While the speaker of the day glorifies 
the external interests of humanity in agriculture, com- 
merce, industry, Emma's lover hints at the individual's 
ability to " overcome everything," its tormenting dreams, 
its expanding horizons, its beautiful passions. In the 
heart of the egoiste, the conflict of inner and outer 
assumes at the same time the form of a duel between 
private and conventional morality, the superior ideals 
of the sky, the stupid principles of earth. 25 It was in 
this desire to witness and enjoy the realization of her 
felicific dream that Madame Bovary succumbed to sin. 

Thought, which, to the classic thinker as to the ration- 
alist of modern times, was the constructive principle of 
reality, is thus regarded as the destructive agency, as 
that which produces the naught; unlike Plato, Aquinas, 
and Spinoza, Flaubert cannot be persuaded that man 
lives in his mind. This intellectual nihilism of Flau- 
bert, this sacrifizio delV intelleto, seems to be due to the 
artist's feeling that the more the intellect expends the 

22 Madame Bovary, Pt. II, VII. 

^Essais de Psychologie Contemporamv, 154-155. 

2 * Madame Bovary, Pt. II, VI. « lb., Pt. II, VII. 



322 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

energy of the soul, the less will the soul have for the 
will; so that, in the last analysis, Flaubert is making 
his appeal for voluntarism. It was Madame Bovary's 
surrender to sentiment, her repudiation of domestic 
responsibility, and her final rejection of the moral law 
of the will, which involved her in the negation which at 
last demanded the negation of her own life. In our 
generation, this intellectual nihilism shows itself in 
Nietzsche, who will allow nothing in science or religion, 
in art or ethics, to prevent him from upholding a relent- 
less Dionysianism, a supreme, " Be hard ! " 

In the case of Flaubert's confrere, Turgenieff, indi- 
vidualism finds a more clear and convincing contention 
against the aesthetics of the intellect, as also a more 
definite expression of nihilism, a word which was coined 
by the author of Fathers and Children 26 Unlike Ma- 
dame Bovary, the typical nihilist of Turgenieff is con- 
scious of both his inner, aesthetical life and the activistic 
impulses which tend to lead him to his work in the 
exterior order. Such is the case with Nezhdanoff, 
whose inner life had been developed to the pitch of 
artistic perfection ; convinced that he has a mission 
in the social order, the youth seeks to neutralize the 
aesthetical by the practical. Rejoicing in the sufficiency 
of an interior sense of culture, he is confronted with 
the importance of " serving the earth " ; 27 when, how- 
ever, he desires to consecrate his powers to the cause 
of social betterment, he becomes skeptical, and calls 
himself, " accursed aesthetic." 2S In this mood, he feels 
a certain folie du doute, in the midst of which he ex- 
claims, " Oh, Hamlet, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 
how am I to emerge from thy shadow ? " 29 So far as 
his own personality is concerned, it is necessary for him 
to " simplify himself " ; 30 but here was the place where 

M Op. cit., tr. Hapgood, V, 38. * Virgin Soil, tr. Hapgood, VIII, 94. 
28 lb., XVIII, 197. =» lb., 198. ^ lb., Pt. II, 67. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 323 

it was " difficult for the aesthetic to come in contact 
with real life," for, in his most complex character as 
the Russian Hamlet, the hero had placed himself in the 
position, not of a simplified, but of a " superfluous 
man." 31 The conflict between aesthetic superfluity and 
social simplicity finally assumes the form of a battle 
between two men in the heart of the hero; as he bids 
farewell to his beloved, he confesses what his condition 
had been : " I did not know how to simplify myself ; 
the only thing that was left was to erase myself alto- 
gether." 32 

This definite presentation of the nihilistic problem is 
but a phase of the complete doctrine of Turgenieff ; his 
conception of life, expressed analytically in his essay, 
Hamlet and Don Quixote, views humanity as made up 
of the contrasted types of contemplators and activists, 
and seeks to neutralize the excesses of the former, which 
idealizes without being able to realize the practical sig- 
nificance of its sentiments. Unable to advance from 
the thought to the deed, the contemplator seeks refuge 
in nihilism. Such an impossible contemplator was 
Turgenieff' s Rudin, his Lavretsky, in A Nest of Nobles, 
his Litvinoff, in Smoke, although the latter, confused by 
the smoke of modern civilization, tends to come to an 
understanding with life when he abandons his dilettant- 
ism, and takes up his work in the field. Far from 
sympathizing with this nihilism, and even farther from 
Flaubert's despair over it, Turgenieff believes it possible 
for the man of thought to escape the destructive con- 
sequences of his ideas, and take his place in the exterior 
order. This faith expressed itself in connection with 
his favorite character, Bazaroff, in Fathers and Chil- 
dren; having created the term " nihilist," and having 
given himself up to that contemplationism wherein one 
" lies on earth to gaze at heaven," Bazaroff was all but 

«76., 109. ^Ib., 208. 



324 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

able to adjust himself to the world of common people, 
while the closing days of his life made it possible for 
him to feel the reality of progress, and the coming of 
that " loyal time " when there should be a new epoch 
in the history of his country. 33 

In the case of both of these intellectual nihilists, whose 
literary work was contemporary with the Decadence, it 
was possible to regard the Hamlet-like intellect as having 
run far in advance of the Quixotic will; but the utili- 
tarianism which followed their epoch, places us in a 
position where we cannot afford to discountenance the 
claims of the free intellect in its contemplation, even 
when one must lie idly upon the earth in order to view 
the heavens. The passivistic nihilism, which seeks to 
persuade us that we were meant to view the field, rather 
than toil in it, is not our present foe; for we are so 
energized in our intellects, according to the principles 
of a psychology that affects to find in the work of the 
will the same value that once was found in the operation 
of the intellect, that we are persuaded that it is the will 
which to-day acts as the great destructive agency of 
human life. Where once thought was all, now action 
has become supreme ; so that, instead of rejecting the 
intellectual nihilism of fifty years ago, it is wiser to seek 
the re-establishment of a view which made man more 
the homo sapiens, less the diligent laborer. Hence, the 
readjustment of the individual to the world and human- 
ity, in considering the lesson taught by the " super- 
fluous " men of the older generation, must seek to ele- 
vate this idea of social superfluousness to that of genu- 
ine, human superiority. 

(2) The Pessimism of Will 

The difference between individualistic nihilism of the 
type of Flaubert and Turgenieff and personal pessimism 

3 » Op. cit., 321-322. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 325 

seems to lie in the following distinction : Where the 
nihilist is persuaded that there is a work for the will in 
the world, and thinks that it is because of his personal 
unfitness for it that he must assume the attitude of 
negation, the pessimist views the problem from the 
exterior point of view, whence he concludes that the 
world is as unfit for the will as the will for the world. 
The nihilist complains, " I can do nothing " ; the pes- 
simist feels that, however much he can do, all action 
will be in vain. The value of subjective nihilism and 
objective pessimism, while only a relative value, lies in 
the fact that it calls the individual's attention to the 
breach between him who would realize his inner life 
and the world wherein he is supposed to work; and if 
the nihilistic pessimist assures us that between the two, 
the intelligent individual and the exterior world, there 
is no possible commerce, individualism is warned that 
the reunion of the self and the world can come about 
only as newer and more sufficient conceptions of both 
subject and object are entertained and rendered authen- 
tic. Free individualism has been reduced to its most 
definite terms ; sheer utilitarianism has been brought to 
its final analysis ; and no common denominator has been 
found. Shall the world then yield to the Decadent, or 
shall the individual submit to the utilitarian? Genuine 
individualism, the critical individualism of the future r 
is willing to abide by neither result ; the individualism 
of the future insists upon the mutual understanding of 
the inner and outer, of the self and society, while it 
holds itself ready to re-define both the self and society 
in such a way as to effect harmony between them. 

Pessimism may be understood as the conviction that 
the world is so constituted as to afford no place for the 
human will. The fault lies, not in the will alone, but 
in the world where the will tries to introduce itself. 
The question at hand, then, has to do with the possi- 



326 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

bility of work in the world, rather than with the mere 
power of the individual's will. In the striking instance 
of Schopenhauer, the classic treatment of the pessimistic 
problem does not confine itself to a discourse upon the 
sadness of life or the pathos of the human situation as 
such; it expresses itself in a manner more radical. It 
is quite true that Schopenhauer did develop the cosmic 
and eudaemonistic forms of the pessimistic philosophy; 
yet the essence of his conception of the problem is to 
be found in the contention that the highest life-ideal 
consists in the negation of the will, when it is the very 
genius of the will to assert itself. Thus, it is not that 
the will lacks power, or that the will, with its knowledge 
of the will-to-live, is wanting in intelligence; it is the 
feeling that the work of the will can only be in vain, 
that, as we to-day should say, it cannot elaborate values 
in the world. The will has all power, for its partici- 
pation in the one Will-to-Live makes it almighty; der 
Wille ist nicht nur frei, sondern so gar allm'dchtig . 34 
As the rationalism of Geulincx had asserted that the 
self should will nothing, because it could do nothing, 
the voluntarism of Schopenhauer insists that the will 
should will nothing, because it can do everything. Now 
here is the place where individualism and voluntarism 
lock horns ; individualism is cheered by a metaphysics 
which attributes limitless power to the will, but sees no 
reason why the doing all should lead to the doing nought. 
In the egoistic affirmation of the individual as a free 
force, as that which can really and effectually put its 
will into the world, individualism seeks a more con- 
vincing interpretation of the pessimistic philosophy. 
In the case of the Schopenhauerian Nietzsche, this 
pessimism may perhaps be found. " Is there," asks 
Nietzsche, "a pessimism of strength? Is there per- 
haps suffering in overfullness itself ? " 35 In Nietzsche's 

81 Welt als Wille u. Tors., § 53. 

35 Birth of Tragedy, tr. Haussemann, § 1. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 327 

mind, this positive pessimism may be attributed to the 
eternal Will-to-Live, to God Himself, " who, in creating 
worlds, frees himself from the anguish of fullness and 
overfullness." 36 There was in Nietzsche no lack of 
that nihilism which had made its impression upon such 
intellectualists as Flaubert and Turgenieff; yet, in 
Nietzsche's case, this nihilism, with its perplexity con- 
cerning the relative values of intellect and will, despairs 
of neither the contemplative nor the active, but seeks 
a readjustment of these in art and ethics. This read- 
justment must come about by the recognition of the 
Dionysian will, just as it must involve the subjugation 
of the formal intellect to that will. At the same time, 
the intellect, while losing for a while somewhat of its 
one-time Apollonian glory, can only be a gainer from 
a process which affords it new and fuller work in the 
re-subordination of the titanic, barbaric will. The 
Apollonian intellect none the less than the Dionysian 
will, felt itself related to and interested in the chaos of 
titanic forces, for " Apollo could not live without 
Dionysus." 37 With his mistrust of science, as of all 
things optimistic and intellectualistic, Nietzsche repudi- 
ated the metaphysics of the day, and declared that 
" Being " was a " fiction invented by those who suffered 
from becoming." 38 

As Nietzsche's opposition to passivistic pessimism 
was doubtless due to his intense individualism, so the 
individualist everywhere arms himself within against 
the nihilism which tends to render man passive, work- 
less in the world. Intellectual individualism, which 
seems to express the most perfect realization of the 
egoistic " I am," has always suffered from the suspicion 
that one cannot be one's self within, cannot be one's 
self without the otherness of things and persons. The 
history of individualism bears the record of Ironie, 
31 ib., § 5. « lb., § 4. sa Ib ^ Irt . 



328 THE GROUND AND GOAE OF HUMAN LIFE 

Ivory Tower, a morbid soi-meme, an impossible maison- 
ette outside the world; for this reason, it becomes the 
task of individualism to assign to the human self such 
a work as shall not render man exterior to himself, shall 
not plunge his will into utilitarianism. One may not 
wish to remain superfluous, yet that were finer than 
inferiority; one may not care to stand out in anti-social 
defiance, yet that is better than abject social submission. 
The question is largely, if not wholly, a question of 
worth : Is it worthy to be social, or worthy to be anti- 
social ? The " character " which one is supposed to 
develop in the stream of the world is not the character 
which the spiritual life of man has promised to the 
human self; and it is doubtful whether Goethe would 
have been satisfied with such a character for himself. 
On the other hand, decadent individualism, which led 
Baudelaire to his les gracieuses Melancholies et les 
nobles Desespoirs, 39 is equally unpromising for genuine 
human character; for man is a human valuer in the 
world. 

Pessimism, if it must be entertained as a doctrine, can 
be limited to the intellect, even when one may indulge 
the thought that it is none the less applicable to the will ; 
one view has to do with the mind's outlook upon the 
world, while the other concerns the will's feeling about 
itself. Wagner was justified in making his Wotan 
assume a gloomy attitude toward the world, where he 
beheld the twilight of the gods ; but it does not follow 
that he was as just in conclusion to the effect that 
Wotan could only resort to Nirvanism and inactivity. 
Indeed, the more forbidding the appearance of the ex- 
terior order, the stronger should the will become, the 
more optimistic its feeling. But Wotan, instead of 
taking a heroic stand, reverses the ideals which the 
individualist himself is expected to entertain; where 

38 Fleurs du Mai, Int., 24. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 329 

we might imagine him to express sorrow at the im- 
pending doom, he confesses that that catastrophe gives 
him no grief, 40 and where we might expect him to strive 
with the hope of overcoming his obstacle, we find him 
relapsing into passivism, an inexplicable Nicht Schaffen. 
Individualism must dissent from such a presentation of 
the life-problem ; for where one is doubtless justified in 
assuming a serious, if not pessimistic, attitude toward 
the world, one must confine one's pessimism to the 
intellect, which, with its wide range of vision, can 
hardly help feeling that the world is too vast for the 
mind; the will, however, with its immediate application 
to some special form of activity, is not necessarily 
hindered by the consciousness of obstacle, while it is 
capable of being thrilled by the possibility of over- 
coming; its noble blindness and its intimate feeling of 
strength should equip it for the task which the world 
presents. With Geulincx and Schopenhauer, it was the 
intellect which was responsible for the ideal of passiv- 
ism; with Wagner, who had no such dialectical ability, 
and who had the consciousness of his work as revolu- 
tionist to inspire him, the pessimistic conclusion is to 
be attributed to an inherent sense of weakness. Now, 
it is just this anaemic notion that individualism seeks 
to set aside in its activistic optimism. 

The task of individualism is thus seen to consist in 
de-idealizing the pessimism of the will; only the deca- 
dent thought of Baudelaire and Wagner could frame the 
ideal of " noble despair" ; healthy individualism seeks 
rather to exalt the heroic ideal of striving in the midst 
of obstacles, even when those obstacles are never min- 
imized by the intellect. In the sublime instance of 
Buddhistic pessimism, which was present to the minds 
of both Wagner and Schopenhauer, the passivistic con- 
clusion does not follow from the nihilistic ideal of 

« Walkure, II Alct, II Sc. 



33° 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Nirvana, so that one might be an intellectual Nirvanist 
without resorting to inaction. The clearer the convic- 
tion of the nothingness of the world, the more forceful 
the idea that man has a world-work; such was the life- 
ideal of Gautama Buddha, as a result of which history- 
records the spread of a most impressive religious cult. 
With Stoicism, which could find nothing of worth in 
the world, there is none the less the record of a world- 
work far superior to anything the life-believing Epicu- 
rean had to offer. 41 So likewise in the case of Chris- 
tianity, where the world is set aside as worthless; how 
much has Europe owed to this combination of intellect- 
ual pessimism and voluntaristic optimism? Optimism 
of intellect has little to do with optimism of will; in- 
deed, one might even say that the effect of an optimistic 
intellect in persuading man that life is satisfactory has 
the effect of softening the will to such a degree as to 
produce passivism. When, therefore, the individualist 
is confronted by the question of pessimism, his con- 
dition of mind cannot ethically assume the inactivistic 
ideal, but should find in the pessimistic situation the 
ground for volitional strength and courage. 

III. LIFE THE PLACE OF TRUTHS 

There seems to be no inherent reason why life as 
such should not be as ready to supply the intellect of 
man with truths as it has been found to furnish his 
senses with joys, his will with values. By parity of 
reasoning, it seems credible that the social organization 
of human existence should be fruitful of all three bene- 
fits, joys, values, and truths; although, as a matter of 
experience, one finds that society seems more inclined 
to make man's life worthful rather than joyful and 
truthful. This may be but a fact of appearance; yet 
the individual has the feeling that, where the social 

41 Cf. Lecky, History of European Morals, 3rd Ed., I, 172-177. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 331 

order is ready and fit to take care of his values for him, 
the joy and truth of life must be sought by the indi- 
vidual himself. Values are by nature practical; they 
represent the needs of the average man whose life is 
largely an exteriorized life; by virtue of their apparent 
mediocrity, values may be taken up and developed by 
a State which cannot be expected to deal in joys and 
truths. There can be a practical State, but can there 
be an aesthetic and spiritual State also? The failure 
of society to account for and further the joy of life led 
to individualistic decadence with its anti-social corol- 
lary; if, now, society cannot supply the demand for the 
truth of life, the result is likely to reveal a similar result, 
in the form of anti-social skepticism. Indeed, the im- 
potence of the social order to give to the self such values 
as should themselves have worth did not fail to reveal 
the anti-social tendency toward passivistic pessimism. 
In connection with the present question, individualism 
comes to the State with Pilate's question; if the State 
cannot make reply, the individual will have to answer 
its own question. 

1. Truth and Life; 

Far from being a problem which society has left 
untouched, the query, What is truth? is one which 
society has ever been ready to answer; indeed, society 
answered the question before it was asked, just as it 
has always been ready to thrust upon the credulous mind 
an excess of answering as soon as the least show of 
inquiry was apparent. Can society answer the indi- 
vidual's questions? That is a juncture which is of 
deepest concern with individualism in which the truth 
of life is of peculiar meaning. Before man ever asked 
the question, How did the State come into being? did 
not society declare that the State was of divine origin, 
or the deduction of reason, or the result of human 



33^ 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



compact, or of spontaneous natural generation? God 
or reason, man or nature, has been the answer to the 
inquiry concerning the foundation of the social order. 
That such conceptions may not have been of practical 
expediency is not the same as that they were veritable 
solutions of the problem involved ; one may live and 
work under the auspices of that which is an imperfect, 
'if not fictitious, notion; but he cannot so easily think 
under such conditions. Thus, the problem concerning 
the truth of social life is by no means the same as the 
simpler question which involves only the practical work- 
ing of the social idea. Is the idea of sociality a sufficient 
answer to the query, What is the truth of man's life? 
That is the issue here involved. 

(i) Sociality and Truth 

When social thought elaborates an idea concerning 
the State, social thought does not leave the being of 
the individual undisturbed; the fate of the species is 
one with the fate of the genus. The well-known habits 
of logical thought are at once recognized when one 
recalls how all thinking is a kind of synthesis in the 
light of which an idea, instead of being allowed to stand 
alone, is subordinated to some other idea, or has another 
idea attached to it as a predicate. In The Struggle for 
the Truth of Life, 42 it was Nature which acted as the 
enclosing truth, it was the natural which took its place 
beside the individual as his predicate. The result was 
a double, parallel assertion, Man is in Nature, man is 
of Nature; man's physical existence within the natural 
order thus led to the assertion of his metaphysical exist- 
ence there, while man's physical make-up as a creature 
of the natural order seemed to give thought the right 
to set up an ethical connection between the subject man 

43 Cf. supra in loc. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 333 

and the predicate natural. Such conceptualism and such 
predication may have been satisfactory to scientism, but 
the career and behaviour of individualism were such as 
to show that the human ego must find the truth of his 
existence elsewhere, in itself alone perhaps. In the 
present connection, where it is the social instead of the 
natural, a similar line of procedure will become appar- 
ent; the social order will endeavor to cast a circle about 
the human self and will then attempt to attach to that 
self the social as a predicative anchor. On its part, 
individualism will be found repudiating both the includ- 
ing concept and the accompanying predicate, so that the 
smug propositions, Man is in society and man is of 
society, will tend to fall to the ground. 

If the light that is in one be darkness, how great is 
that darkness ! On the subject of life, man cannot be said 
to be ignorant, when ignorance might perhaps be better 
for him and more enlightening to his mind; on the sub- 
ject of life, man has drawn his conclusion to the effect 
that life is social, that truth is likewise social. To read 
Stirner is to see how an individualist can come to the 
contrary conclusion ; according to Stirner, man is the 
ego, truth is the self, whence the ego says, " I am man, 
and I am truth." Without passing judgment upon this 
apparent paradox, compare it with the contrary assertion 
of social thought: Man is society, truth is social; society 
equals man, society equals the truth of life. Over and 
above the simple fact that society is an idea more exten- 
sive than that of the individual, is there any inherent 
reason why an unprejudiced mind should conclude in 
favor of the social conception of truth? Where it is 
no question of work, wherein the social aggregate has 
the power and versatility to do more than the individual, 
but a question of truth, is there any reason why one 
should expect to find truth present in society and absent 
from the individual? Society as an idea has indeed 



334 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



become idee fixe, so that, as one sees socialized labor, 
he expects to see socialized truth also; but there is no 
logical reason why truth should take up its abode in the 
social order. When one says, I am the truth, whether 
he be Protagoras or Christ, Descartes or Stirner, one 
feels as though he were in the presence of a paradox 
whose dark statement cannot be comprehended; yet the 
truth of life may be in the individual where it is not in 
society. 

When one attempts to consider truth as something 
individual, one is confronted by the scruple that truth 
to be true must be objective; truth must represent, not 
what the particular individual may think, but what all 
individuals must think. Truth, so it is felt, must be 
free from the personal and temperamental; it must have 
a certain largesse about it, whence one turns from the 
ego to society as the place of truth. That society could 
have deduced the idea of truth is one thing; that society 
as now constituted and now understood does contain the 
truth of life is another. Society is concerned for the 
man who eats and drinks, who seeks clothing and shel- 
ter, who carries on war and commerce; but is society 
as anxious about man as a creature who seeks the truth 
of the life which he is living? Social living may per- 
haps be comprehended in connection with Comte's idea 
of " social physics," but can social thinking go on upon 
the basis of such a conception of man's life? The atti- 
tude of the individualist toward society is likely to 
have about it a certain amount of skepticism, due to 
the fact that the social synthesis of life is too narrow. 

The inception of social thinking was effected by an 
agnostic preliminary. What, at heart, was the meaning 
of this resolute denial of the Beyond, and why should 
the apostle of Man think to aid his cause by negating 
the idea of God? Anselm found the idea of God in 
intellectu, and sought to place it in re; Spencer did not 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 335 

develop a theology which was calculated either to affirm 
or deny the existence of God as such, or in reality, but 
attempted to relieve man of the ideal possession of the 
notion. Thus it was affirmed by agnosticism that, 
whether there be a transcendent spiritual life or not, 
we are assured that the idea of this is not an authentic 
one in the mind. Scientism, then, opposed Scholastcism, 
not upon theological, but upon psychological grounds, for 
scientism said, the mind has no just idea of God, no 
place for it in the scheme of truth. In recognition of 
the claims thus made by agnostic scientism, it is only 
fair to say that the theist, like Anselm and Descartes, 
had been somewhat hasty in his assertion that the human 
mind contains the idea of an Absolute Being; for, while 
introspection may indeed show this to be the case, it is 
not logic to take it for granted. For this reason, phi- 
losophy of religion cannot make use of the ontological 
argument until it has first elaborated a psychological 
argument. On the other hand, agnostic scientism was as 
hasty as Scholasticism; for scientism made the assump- 
tion that, in the idea of Man, the mind will find truth. 
Agnosticism did not fail to recognize the fact that 
man must have truth, that the mind prizes its ideas in 
the same way that it deems its sensations and impulses 
precious things. And, just as the sensation and impulse 
must have something objective, so the idea demands that 
upon which it can lean; the idea cannot live in intellectu 
solo. But, we may ask, what has been the exterior 
support of the idea-making mind? The spiritual having 
been denied, the mind of man was invited to repose in 
the idea of the social. The history of individualism has 
shown us how difficult is this transition from a belief 
in the remotely spiritual to the immediatley social; and, 
even when one is silent about his desire to know the 
Beyond, his sense of truth compels him to confess 
that faith in the social seems no more satisfactory than 



336 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

an old-time belief in the invisible. Individualism has 
learned Stirner's lesson that there is as little truth in 
the idea of Man as in the idea of God, just as it has 
found, after the manner of Stirner, that the purely 
humanistic may be as oppressive an idea as was the old 
conception of a spiritual kingdom. What does man gain 
intellectual when he places before him the abstract idea 
of Humanity? The idea seems to have no more reality 
than the idea of Divinity; yet, at the same time, it is 
more threatening, since it makes necessary the subsump- 
tion of the self in the social, while the idea of God, 
unless conceived in a purely pantheistic fashion, ex- 
pressed no such antipathy to the individual. In the 
case of Wagner, the exchange of the humanistic for 
the spiritual and religious was no more helpful or con- 
vincing. If a Wotan cannot convince us of Divinity 
in life, a Siegfried is equally impotent to bring us to the 
conclusion that Humanity is true. 

Individualism is thus led to feel that society is hardly 
to be called the place of truths; its skepticism assumes 
certain definite forms. The first difficulty in the mind 
of him who is anxious to find truth in the social is that 
which involves the peculiar Realism of the argument. 
With Platonism, this classic realism was not inappro- 
priate, nor did it fail to produce something like a satis- 
factory notion in the Platonic idea of the State. Such 
was likewise the fortune of Scholasticism which, insist- 
ing that universalia sunt realia, was able thus to syn- 
thesize all individual examples under such general heads 
as Man and Church. Whether scientism has the right 
to make use of a method so alien to its positivism is 
important, but inconsistency of method is not the su- 
preme consideration. The question is, What kind of 
universal has agnostic scientism spread out over the 
head of the individual? One might, perhaps, believe in 
the classic State, for the idea thereof was formed in 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 337 

connection with ideas already approved by the intellect; 
one might place his affair upon the scholastic Church, 
since the formulation of this idea was not carried on 
in ignorance of the intellect's desires. But can one 
similarly believe, or attempt to believe, in the Social? 
The formation of this idea, if indeed it ever took place, 
had nothing of the intellectual about, and even when 
one may have little interest in intellectualism, the mind 
as such is not given to groundless beliefs. 

In the ethics of social evolution, the metaphysical has 
been as important as the moral ; the system has appealed 
to the intellect as well as to the will. Spencer sought 
to shun this metaphysical implication when he closed the 
agnostic door against the alleged realities of the Beyond ; 
Stephen introduced his scheme in a manner no less 
agnostic, as also with the expressed determination to 
" postpone metaphysical problems." 43 Perhaps Stephen 
was sincere and careful in his choice of the word 
" postponement " ; for, instead of assuming a complete 
denial of their existence, he merely indulged in delay. 
The study of the social and the faithful pursuit of the 
evolutionary did not permit as much delay, however, as 
the science of ethics seemed to promise; hence, it was 
not long before the social evolutionist was found making 
use of mediaeval realism. In his anxiety to secure a 
basis for morality, Stephen reverts to the ontological 
example of the " State " and the " Church " 44 after the 
analogy of which he proceeds to elaborate the scientific 
idea of the " Social Organism." 45 Nor does this on- 
tology stop at the idea of ethics as a science; it con- 
tinues until it has changed the moral norm from a 
nominalist " Do this " to a realist " Be this." 46 Now 
it must appear that, in the intellectual idea of " Social 
Organism," as also in the ontological command to be 

43 Science of Ethics, I, 3. « lb., Ill, 21. 

i5 Ib., Ill, 31. *>rb., IV, 16. 



338 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

social, there is room for much individualistic doubt. 
The truth of life seems unwilling to inhabit such a 
conception of man. 

Not only does the social idea destroy the idea of God, 
but it acts destructively upon the idea of man; where 
first it fails to grant belief in Divinity, it ends by 
removing belief in Humanity. When one objectifies 
his ideas and thus, with Plato, endeavors to find him- 
self in the State, or when such objectifi cation seeks the 
objectifi cation of the individual's faith in the form of 
a Church, the character of individualism is more or 
less faithfully preserved; but when one objectifies his 
physical nature and thus makes up the idea of Society 
upon a biological basis, the ego cannot dwell in the 
house which he has himself built. The result is that the 
individualist must indulge in complete agnosticism and 
thus deny both forms of spiritual life; the Divine and 
the Human become equally unknowable when they are 
subjected to the treatment of scientism and sociality. 
If there is no God in the one, there is no Man in the 
other; man no longer believes in either Deity or Indi- 
viduality. By concentrating attention upon the physical 
and social, modern thought hoped to drive truth into a 
corner; but now it appears that the truth of life is not 
to be found in this restricted area. 

(2) Humanity and Truth 

That there is a life-truth in Humanity as an order, 
apart from the " I think " of the individual, need not 
itself be doubted, even when the socialized formulation 
of this life-truth appears incredible and unconvincing. 
Humanity is at once a way of doing and a way of think- 
ing, while Humanity's aim has been both the exterior 
elaboration of civilization and an interior perfection 
through culture. The truths of life which have been 
created by humanity have been one with the works of 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 339 

the same human spirit; ancient works and ancient ideals, 
mediaeval creations and mediaeval creeds, modern en- 
ergies and modern norms, have been concomitant and 
interactive. Man has always had the desire, not only 
to do, but to understand what he was doing, so that the 
activities of the will have united with the activities of 
the intellect. Instead of being an idea framed in the 
free by some especially gifted thinker, the idea of hu- 
manity came into being at a time when the individual 
was wanting in philosophic profundity, but when man- 
kind was seeking some new form of life for itself. 
It was from the Stoics rather than from an earnest 
Socrates or a lofty Plato or an encyclopedic Aristotle 
that the idea of humanity came. But, when humanity 
in the intensiveness of existence formulates the general 
idea of its own being, the result is not the same as that 
achieved when a socialized age endeavors to express 
the truth of life by regarding all existence sub specie 
sociatatis. 

If society be given the deep interpretation, it becomes 
possible to regard society as the place of truths. Per- 
haps the trouble with the age of sociality lies in the 
fact that the pursuit of truth has not been made as 
serious a matter as the pursuit of value, so that the 
social idea, instead of representing what the age has 
thought about human life in the world, really stands for 
no more than a corollary to the general proposition con- 
cerning the values of man's life. In social thinking, 
there is indeed a show of earnestness, but it does not 
appear that the modern mind has labored as assiduously 
in the development of truth as it has in the elaboration 
of worth; the modern mind has had more anxiety about 
nature than about man, so that its opinions of human 
life, as these are expressed socially, should not stand 
for the logical result which might otherwise be drawn. 
When thought regards society as the place of truth, it 



22 



340 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is possible to raise the condition of human life above 
mediocrity, while it will provide a place for the indi- 
vidual who is now expatriated. Society as the place of 
utilities makes for none but the workers of the race and 
those who furnish such ideals as may be utilized; soci- 
ety as the place of truths will afford an empire for the 
enlightened. 

The failure to recognize the larger, deeper meaning 
of the social is due to the failure to give an adequate 
definition of man. From the utilitarian standpoint, 
man is the eater, the fighter, the worker, the man of 
exteriority; from the individualistic point of view, man 
is none the less the thinker, the artist, the worshipper, 
the man of interiority. Our study of man leads us to 
view the primitive human being as one who had needs, 
while our conception of the man of the present is of 
one whose interests are industrial ; when the viewpoint 
of inner individualism is assumed, it becomes possible 
to consider the primitive man as the one who gave us 
our ideals of art and religion, just as we are able to 
look upon the perfected man of civilization as one who 
stands in need of ideals as well as utilities. By what 
right do we define man after the manner of economics 
alone, when the facts of history do not fail to point out 
the possibility of an ethical interpretation as well? The 
individualist cannot come to an understanding with so- 
ciety because the social ideal, instead of including the 
spiritual strivings of humanity, draws around mankind 
the circle of utility and material progress. The duty of 
philosophy in this connection does not consist in the 
exaltation and elaboration of needs, which are so urgent 
in themselves as to deserve no philosophical further- 
ance, but has to do with the expression of the ideals 
which are just as characteristic of humanity, but which 
are likely to be overlooked in the midst of immediate 
necessities. Where social life is purely utilitarian, those 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 341 

who would pursue ideals of joy and enlightenment are 
forced to assume an anti-social attitude, even when they 
recognize and confess that they have not thought of 
severing their connection with humanity. 

Since society as its life is lived and its ideals are 
generated is not altogether the place of truths, the indi- 
vidualist fears to take his place in the world of work 
lest he lose the meaning of his own existence. Will 
and intellect are so intimately related that, while the 
will cannot operate apart from ideational assistance, 
when this has been granted, it is the tendency of the 
volitional process to cover up its tracks, and thus hide 
from the actor the essential purpose of his work. It 
might seem as though an individual who threw himself 
into the world of affairs there to mingle with his fel- 
lows, there to co-operate with them in the industrial 
perfection of nature, would be the one best fitted to 
inform mankind as to the purpose of human life. The 
activist, instead of viewing the world from afar, has 
entered it, handled its forces, and observed its ways, so 
that we are tempted to look to him for advice concern- 
ing the plan of the whole which the man of contem- 
plation views au distance. Unhappily enough, such is 
not the case; for the opinions of practical man are 
opinions indeed, deduced from time to time in the midst 
of practical needs, while he who would understand his 
life feels the need of a view upon which he may base 
his ideal of a life-value for humanity. It is the lack of 
interior life which makes the position of the practical 
man so pathetic and ignoble ; wanting in enjoyment, the 
practical man suffers even more from lack of insight 
into the meaning of the life about which he is so assid- 
uous. To what extent, we may inquire, is ignorance of 
the issues of life due to the limitations of the mind, to 
what degree has the question of the life-value been 
obscured by undue social activity? It is undeniable 



342 THE GROUND AND GOAL, OF HUMAN LIFE 

that society in the nineteenth century took no pains to 
enlighten its members concerning the meaning of their 
existence or the motive of their work; society has not 
been the place of truth. 

As a generalization, then, the " social " appears to be 
wanting in those marks which are inwardly character- 
istic of man as man ; the physical should not obscure the 
human, the economic the ethical. The conduct of the 
positivistic social thinker has not been unlike that of a 
modern archaeologist who seeks to determine the genu- 
ineness of a statue alleged to be Phidian or Praxitelian 
by making a chemical analysis of the marble that he 
may conclude from the absence or presence of the 
Pentelic or Parian whether the Venus was hewn from 
the ancient quarry or not; if this were the sole archaeo- 
logical method, our art-ideals would be as much at the 
mercy of science as are many of our ethical hopes. 
" Social physics " is not likely to prevent the social 
skepticism which now threatens us, so that the physical 
generalization of mankind stands in need of the addition 
of such humanistic marks as shall make possible the 
definition of man as man. 

2. The Individual as Skeptic 

From the foregoing consideration of the truth of 
society, we must pass on and consider the causes of 
that skepticism which follows in its wake. At the very 
outset, one might think to suggest that such a consid- 
eration were unnecessary in view of the fact that social 
thinking began under the auspices of an agnosticism 
which was as frank and painstaking a form of the skep- 
tical as one could desire. This skepticism concerning 
the spiritual order, with which social thinking initiated 
its career, has been examined already; now is the time 
to observe how anti-social thinkers have found it as 
necessary to doubt the truth of the immediate as the 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 343 

social thinker had thought to doubt the truth of the 
remote; for it is the social itself which has of late come 
under the cloud of doubt. Man may doubt the God- 
idea and think thus to concentrate all his belief upon 
the man-idea; but the fact now confronts us that man 
doubts man, for the idea of humanity seems as illogical 
as that of divinity. 

(1) Skepticism as Dilettantism 

As the anti-social in Decadence showed itself first in 
passive aestheticism, as social pessimism began as nihil- 
ism, so the full social skepticism of the day had its 
beginning in the dilettantism of the cultured man. Be- 
tween dilettantism and skepticism, there is as close a 
connection as that between those parallel forms of pro- 
test against the socialization of life, whereby the individ- 
ualist was led to entertain an anti-social attitude toward 
the world because it seemed far from being a world of 
joys or a world of values. Skeptical dilettantism cannot 
be more fully persuaded that society is the place of 
truths. This dilettantism, while it directs itself most 
perfectly against the social as idea, has not failed to 
find some kind or degree of expression in the midst of 
Decadence and nihilism ; Baudelaire was thus a dilettant, 
as was the case also with Flaubert. In its most essential 
form, dilettantism consists in the inability on the part 
of the individual to solve the disjuntive dilemma of the 
mind and thus say either yes or no. Baudelaire thus fell 
between joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness, as Flau- 
bert was Hamlet-like in his attitude toward action and 
thought. In the case of the Dilettant, there is a peculiar 
inability to decide between the claims of the true and 
the false in social life. According to Bourget, the psy- 
chology of dilettantism may be understood when one 
considers how the culture of the modern epoch is char- 
acterized by the mind's participation in " an infinite 



344 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



fecundity of things," whence arises a melange of ideas 
and the " conflict among the dreams of the universe 
elaborated by diverse races." 47 

The semi-skeptical attitude of the dilettant is emi- 
nently the condition of the individualist of the day, so 
that, in the larger sense, Wagner and Ibsen may be said 
to belong to this class of thinkers, even when the dilet- 
tant attitude as such seems to represent the ideas of a 
later period, just as it involves a type of mind some- 
what alien to the constructive aesthetics of these masters. 
There is in dilettantism a certain absence of metaphysics 
which is not conspicuous in either Wagner or Ibsen; 
furthermore, both of these geniuses, Ibsen in his social 
plays and Wagner in the Nibelungen Ring, refused to 
keep aloof from the social problems of their day; now, 
the dilettant is neither social nor anti-social, for his 
attitude is more that of the superior man. In such 
capacity, the dilettant treats the real world in a spirit 
thoroughly Laodicean ; he cannot affirm, is unwilling to 
deny, so that he can only regard the spectacle of reality 
with a certain wistfulness born of perplexity. 

In the history of individualism, the world has been 
the subject of, first, a sharp negation, then, an equally 
vivid affirmation. The method of rationalism was such 
as to make possible the complete negation of the natural 
and social orders as such, whence the desire to prove 
the existence of the outer world, the reality of the social 
order. When positivism took the place of this indi- 
vidualistic rationalism, the same relentless attitude was 
to be observed, although the method had so reversed 
itself as to involve the affirmation of the exterior and 
the negation of the interior. Yet. in either case, the 
spirit was the same; the power of the mind to affirm 
or deny, as the case may have been, was whole and 
sound. Now, with rationalism already passed and with 

47 Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, 65, 67. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 345 

positivism passing, the mind has not the will to say 
either yes or no to its impressions or its feelings. The 
nihilistic inability to act reappears in the dilettant in- 
ability to choose; in the instance of nihilism, the diffi- 
culty seemed to lie in the preponderance of inner senti- 
ment over outward-going volition; with dilettantism, the 
difficulty seems to reveal itself in the peculiar conditions 
of the exterior order of both nature and society. There, 
in the external world, the individual is immediately con- 
fronted by an indefinite, limitless number of things, as 
these have been discovered by science, which has spent 
its time in submitting them to definite analysis. In the 
attempt to elaborate a synthesis of the manifold in its 
quantitative and qualitative complexity, the individual 
finds that science has, in its methods, a suggestion of 
the diversity which is so peculiar to the facts. No 
longer can we say, Science is one, philosophies are 
many; for the lack of unity in science, as shown by its 
several geometries, its different chemistries, its various 
evolutions, unfits it for the synoptic grasp of the world 
as this was possible with Comte. 

The confusion of facts and theories, as we must con- 
tinually remind ourselves, pertains, not to the spiritual 
order, but to the natural and social one. Positivism 
has not kept its promise with man, for when positivism 
agreed to reveal Matter if we would turn away from 
Spirit, agreed to show us Man if we would ignore God, 
it has not been able to keep its word. At this time, we 
will not stop to develop the thought that, perhaps, it was 
this very dualism of the human understanding which is 
now responsible for the dilemma in which we are placed ; 
nor will we pause to ask ourselves whether or not the 
mind is so constituted that it cannot comprehend the 
immediate without viewing the remote, the outer apart 
from the inner. Our chief interest is now the fate of 
natural and social thinking in the attempt of this style 



346 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of reasoning to view the world and humanity as such. 
In Bourget's essay on Renan, 48 the author of La Vie de 
Jesu is made the symbol of modern dilettantism; but the 
fine analysis of this trait of contemporary culture seems 
to extend far beyond the limits of Renan's genius. 
Furthermore, where Renan fell into his dilettant skep- 
ticism upon the theological rather than the positivistic 
side of contemporary culture, the present-day dilettant 
seems to be assuming the attitude of indecision toward 
things temporal and human. At the same time, it may 
be said of the man of the hour that, like Renan, he 
suffers from l' horrible manie de certitude. 49 Man feels 
that he must comprehend the world in which he lives : 
hence the theory of evolution which seeks to bring to 
the light data and principles which have the most remote 
reference to the life of man to-day; hence heredity, 
which refuses to take the given individual for granted; 
hence history, which cannot accept the present as such. 
In literature, the same act of extension has made war 
upon the intensive behavior of the mind from which the 
sense of life's unified purpose is supposed to come. The 
more that is portrayed, the less that is demonstrated; 
for the writer has become the descriptive scientist, who 
is content to unearth facts, when he is not ready to 
assume either mental or moral responsibility for them. 
This dialectic of dilettantism appears most strikingly in 
fiction, where the literary art is so replete with man- 
ners, motives, emotions, temperaments, and situations 
that there is no room for morals, acts, ideals, purposes. 
In the same manner, criticism loses its way in the super- 
ficial manifold, whence it is unable to discern whether 
there be aesthetic value in the art under examination. 
The dilettant writer places himself in a position where 
he cannot identify himself with his work; cannot be 

48 Essais de Psychologic Contemporaine , in loc. 
48 Of. Bourget, Op. cit., 74. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 347 

one with his favorite characters, as Wagner was kin to 
his Wotan, Ibsen to his Brand, his Stockman, his Ros- 
mer, his Master Builder. Yet, for the most part, these 
literary works speak for the present situation, as this is 
shown in the scientific and social ; but, here, it seems 
there is no opportunity for the artist to affirm an ideal 
or to lay down a principle. As the scientist is forced 
to build a wall within his soul and thus keep his science 
here, his personality there, so the artist must fence his 
art by his will. 

However paradoxical it may appear, the skepticism 
of the dilettant is due to an overperfect comprehension 
of the world, whereby the ability to exercise choice 
and decision becomes weakened. According to Morice, 
" dilettantism is the anaesthesia of the creative faculties 
by the hypertrophy of the faculties of comprehension." 50 
In the cases of Ernest Renan and Anatole France, the 
spirit of dilettantism reveals itself in the uncertainty 
with which these geniuses laid hold upon the present and 
the corresponding certainty which they felt in handling 
things of the past. In the special case of Anatole 
France, there was a certain touch of futurism, which 
may seem to have redeemed this thinker from skepticism 
concerning the present ; but the airy utopianism of The 
White Stone, with its spineless, nerveless State, reveals 
the author as one who had not wholly freed himself 
from capitalism to lay a firm grasp upon collectivism. 
In default of conviction, the thinker seeks to content his 
intellect through literary style. 51 One should not be too 
severe perhaps with those who are neither hot nor cold, 
who in their inability to exercise preference are neither 
in the present nor out of it; so puzzling are the con- 
ditions of contemporary thought, with its individualism 
and socialism, positivism and humanism, intellectualism 

50 La Litterature de Tout & L'Heure, 257. 

51 Op. cit., tr. Roche, V, 183, et seq. 



348 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

and voluntarism, that one cannot so easily adjust the 
claims of these opposed tendencies. In the absence of 
any thorough distinction between truth and error, be- 
tween good and bad, beautiful and ugly, the student of 
contemporary thought can give himself up to the study 
of that which has been achieved in the past or that 
which is dreamed of for the future; but to interpret the 
present in the light of the past, and to base the future 
upon the present, is an act of grave, comprehensive 
thinking of practical impossibility. 

The inability of the contemporary thinker to come to 
an understanding with his mind appears, not only in 
connection with the intellect, but likewise in the affairs 
of the emotions and the will. If one is expected to 
" contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate 
emotions," the art of the day places him in a position 
where this emotional contemplation is all but impossible. 
The scientifico-social spectacle of life can arouse no 
emotions which shall be appropriate to the object or 
characteristic of the subject; hence one must assume 
the attitude of indifference. The same condition of 
things appears in the region of morals, where there is 
a pathetic want of ability to distinguish between good 
and bad. In an age of activism and vast enterprise, no 
one acts ; the history of the present, therefore, must 
regard us as being almost Taoistic and Yoga-like in our 
worklessness. There is movement and " functioning," 
but there is no action, for the reason that man does not 
know what he should do. When life demands action 
as such, which is volition according to ideation, we seek 
to settle our account by mere change or movement ; 
hence, work, instead of springing from the fullness of 
the self, is only a means of filling up an inward empti- 
ness. The same situation obtains in the intellectual life, 
where man is even more incapacitated to affirm that 
which is significant and true. Knowledge is no longer 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 349 

the power which Bacon attributed to the knowing mind ; 
for knowledge has made the mind feeble and hesitant. 
The more we gather by way of data, the more critical 
we become in our theories of theory, the less certitude 
we seem to possess. 

(2) Social Skepticism 

The difference between dilettantism and skepticism 
appears chiefly as a difference of degree ; the skeptic 
goes farther than the dilettant. But, in addition to this 
obvious distinction, it may b>e said that skepticism doubts, 
not only the current means of securing truth, but truth 
itself. In the case before us, where we are anxious to 
discover the nature of social truth, the skeptic, instead 
of assuming that such truth reposes in the social order, 
and merely awaits its interpretation, questions whether 
it is there at all. Plato had a method of passing from 
the physical to the social, and the Republic is as genuine 
a piece of work as the Timaeus; but the scientism of 
our day, infinitely different from the dialectics of Plato, 
has no such ease in making the transition from the facts 
of nature to the forms of social life. Then, in the case 
of Plato, the ancient thinker was so happily placed that 
he could subordinate the individual ; but, with the rise 
of modern individualism, the task is by no means so 
easy, especially when the social thinker, instead of rele- 
gating the individual to a noble conception of society, 
an ideal Republic or a City of God, seeks to subsume 
the ego under an order of life the counterpart of which 
may be found in the animal order. The individual must 
listen to the " fable of the bees," to the fable of the 
cows, to the amiable story of how nature has employed 
her realistic arts to group the individuals in the organic 
order. 

Man is so constituted that he feels the need of rever- 
ing something outside himself, and it is this belief in 



350 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

and reverence for the non-egoistic which makes the 
problem of individualism a severe one. Man will be- 
lieve in all other things before he will believe in himself; 
in his curiosity, he will question concerning the nature 
of all things extra-egoistic before he will ask, " Who 
am I ? " For this reason, the obvious egoism of a Stir- 
ner, with its simple, " I am," and the just egoism of an 
Ibsen, with its, " Live thy life," seem ridiculous and 
dangerous. But, if it were not for the social prejudice, 
such individualism could be enjoyed in full naivete. In 
his instinctive desire to have beliefs, man seeks to exer- 
cise faith in something objective. That society may be 
conceived of as " true " is indeed a rational, possible 
idea; but is the present formulation of the social prin- 
ciple credible? Two important elements of the concept 
appear to be lacking in the present formulation of the 
social idea : the particular and the universal. The indi- 
vidual with his inner life as a human being has not been 
included in the process, while the universal as a truly 
generic affair has not been made the object of the gen- 
eralizing process. The scientific " state " is thus a sub- 
ject as far removed from the species as from the genus. 
The neutralization of the individualism of man has 
been the constant contention of individualism, so that 
the present criticism of society need do no more than 
point out that a theoretical process of subordination has 
no logical right to relate the particular to the general 
where that general cannot be said to contain the par- 
ticular. The analysis of the particular is necessitated 
to abstract those marks of the thing as these are essen- 
tial to the latter, as root, trunk, branch, to the tree. 
In the social generalization of the subject Man, that 
which is essential to humanity has been left out of con- 
sideration; namely, joy, worth, truth. The animalistic 
features of the species may have been included, but the 
humanistic ones have been ignored; -so that the social 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 351 

concept Man has not been justly formed. If the social 
generalization had been adequately made, there had been 
no more call for the intense individualism of modern 
times than there was a demand for individualism with 
the ancient state. The Platonic Republic may be an 
unworthy ideal ethically viewed; but, since the logic of 
the idea does not omit the superioristic elements of 
mankind, the generalization cannot be questioned. 

From the standpoint of the universal, or with regard 
to the idea of state as such, there is no less complaint 
on the part of those who seek the adjustment of the 
individual to society. Extreme individualism may op- 
pose the idea of social organization as such, and that 
with the feeling that the spiritual qualities of humanity 
are not such as to permit this organization ; but it is 
the specially social organization of mankind which is 
now before us. The social state is a scientific idea, and 
thus involves all the peculiarities of positivism. These 
may be summed up by saying that, as positivism can 
credit only that which is of immediate interest and exact 
proof, thus the scientific- state must not advance beyond 
this circle of the practical and perceptible. With ancient 
thought, the circle of the state-idea was of such a diam- 
eter as to include the ideal, as this was educed by phi- 
losophy, while the rulers were to be the philosophers 
themselves. With mediaevalism, the religious conscious- 
ness was of such influence as to introduce, not ancient 
wisdom, but piety into the state idea, whence the state 
was viewed as holy. How has the state fared in a 
period like the modern one, in which philosophic wisdom 
and spiritual piety have no place? The elaboration of 
the modern state-idea has been such as to ignore the 
superior attributes of humanity, as these were sincerely 
incorporated in State and Church, and to introduce only 
the inferiorities to humanity; for it is with the obvious 
and inferior that science is forced to deal. 



352 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



The individual has grown skeptical concerning society, 
because the social ideal has failed to take account of 
the most characteristic quality of humanity, humanistic 
culture. In the theory of social contract, as suggested 
originally by Hobbes, the basis of union among the 
previously isolated, inimical individuals was that of 
immediate need, of utility; in the plan of social evolu- 
tion, which has escaped the artificialities of the earlier 
view of society, the indifference to the essential human- 
ism of man is equally, if not more, marked. If, as is 
indeed the case, man is by nature cultural, should not 
the social ideal consult the intellectual as well as the 
sensuous? In Fichte's philosophy of rights, it was 
asserted that the true Fatherland is that state which is 
most highly cultured. 52 Is it not possible for a less 
idealistic system to affirm that some recognition of the 
cultural shall be made by the philosopher of the social? 
One might imagine that social skepticism may be ex- 
plained when it is said that the individual feels all too 
keenly the pressure of material wants ; but our con- 
temporary social consciousness seems to be protesting 
that the scientific state fails to satisfy, not merely the 
demands of the body, but those of the mind also. 

The effect of Decadence was to reveal something more 
than the clearness of the individual's consciousness ; none 
the less did it suggest the obscurity of the social idea. 
What shall we expect the idea of society to yield in the 
way of attributes, utility and nothing more? Individ- 
ualism seems to have undertaken its revolt against the 
state because the state-idea failed to afford the mind 
such notions as truth, virtue, and beauty; the lack of 
these humanistic qualities is at the basis of our present- 
day social skepticism. The validity of the social ideal 
is doubted because this ideal has about it no sense of 
the truth and worth of life. Do not our most charac- 

M Werhe, VII, 212. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 353 

teristic, our most precious interests concern themselves 
with these spiritual goods as well as with the purely 
material ones which society has sought to supply ? Does 
it not appear that the discontented among us, unhappy 
at the thought of the unequal distribution of wealth, are 
duly clamorous for some of the advantages which accrue 
from wealth as well as for wealth itself? "Learned 
leisure " may not of itself present a worthy ideal for 
the individual; still less may it be assumed that it is 
the business of society to afford this to its members; 
nevertheless, it may be asserted that society should so 
be organized upon the basis of truth and value that 
these attributes shall make their appeal to those who 
are organized under the idea of the state. 

It may seem strange that one should expect society 
to deal in such impalpable benefits, but it cannot be 
denied that individualism has been disappointed at its 
failure to find these elements in the social state. In the 
case of Stirner, who was about the first to repudiate 
the social ideal, the individualistic relapse in skepticism, 
which he assumed, was due to the failure to find in the 
Hegelian State anything more real than " a spectre, ein 
Spuk." As Stirner could thus find no intellectual sup- 
port in Society, so Wagner turned away in dismay from 
the idea of a state that so confused the economic ideal 
as to exalt an Alberic while it involved as ethical com- 
plications the triumph of a Hunding and the defeat of 
a noble Siegmund. The truth of life, so he seemed to 
reason, cannot be found in such inferior conceptions of 
property and morality; so that, if such be the method 
of Society, one can only negate it as untrue. In the 
instance of Ibsen, society seemed to lack the support 
which should come from " freedom and truth," whence 
the artist raises the question whether such a society 
should stand. 53 Wilde's rather anarchistic tract, The 

63 Pillars of Society, Act III. 



354 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

Soul of Man under Socialism, assumes its extreme posi- 
tion, not because society fails to feed its members, which 
sad fact he takes care to note, but because this society 
is indifferent to beauty and culture, in which he finds 
the truth of life. 

The intellectual needs of the submerged members of 
society have come under the special notice of Gorky, 
whose Night Refuge is significant, among other things, 
for the following ideas : that, much as mankind may 
need bread and may suffer from the lack of it, the 
deeper need of the soul is for truth ; no matter what 
man may be called upon to suffer, he never sinks below 
his inherent humanity, for man is always man in his 
picturesqueness and dignity. When Gorky plunges his 
people into the depths of despair, and inflicts them with 
hunger, misery, and alcoholism, he does not allow his 
readers to attribute the melancholy to anything peculiar 
to the exterior existence of man in an alien, antagonistic 
world; furthermore, when these afflicted characters 
lament, it is not because of any fault which they find 
with the world as such, for their woes are internal, 
while the redemption from them is, in their minds, some- 
thing to be effected by the individual himself. The sor- 
row is their own, the heart knoweth its own bitterness ; 
it is due to lack of individuality and lack of insight on 
the part of the sufferer. The suffering sophist, Luka, 
thus voices the general woe of mankind when he sings, 
" In the darkness of midnight, no path can be found," 54 
while the alcoholic actor, whose name had long since 
passed into oblivion, corroborates this when he asks, 
" Why am I lost ? Because I believe in myself no more. 
I am through." 55 The "Baron," who longs yet fears to 
be a "contemplator," believes that he " must have been 
born for something," even when it seemed to him that 

51 Night Refuge, tr. Hopkins, Act I. 
55 lb., Act II. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 355 

his whole life long " a fog lay on his brow " ; 56 while 
Anna, the dying consumptive, who cannot remember 
ever to have had enough to eat, does not complain of, 
but inquires about, her sad fate in the world, asking, 
" Why should this have been ? " 5T Gorky pursues such 
a psychology until it further reveals the fact that the 
keenness of hunger may also sharpen the wits, for the 
worker is also the thinker. " Peasants and working- 
men .... they toil all their lives for a mere trifle 
.... And, all of a sudden, they say something you'd 
never think out for yourself in a century." 58 

In addition to the emphasis laid upon intelligence and 
individuality, this social logic expresses also a peculiar 
faith in humanity as such and a characteristic doubt 
concerning the value of truth. In the social skepticism 
which thus comes to the foreground, the point of view 
is not that truth is difficult to find but desirable to pos- 
sess, but the contrary; man can have truth, but truth 
does nothing for him. In the midst of this, there pre- 
vails a Protagoreanism of the humanity of truth. " The 
more I contemplate man," says Luka, " the more inter- 
esting he grows .... poorer and poorer he sinks 
and higher and higher his aspirations mount .... 
Whatever else he may become, he still remains a human 
being." 59 To Kleshtsch, the locksmith, humanistic truth 
seems forever impossible and in vain. " What is the 
truth ? " asks he, springing up as though pierced by the 
word. " Where is the truth ? What is it to me ? Why 
should we have truth ? " 60 When, after the departure 
of the pilgrim Luka, the locksmith renews his attack 
upon truth, he is met by the humanism of Sahtin, who 
declares, " Mankind is the truth .... Man — that 
is the truth .... Man alone exists, the rest is the 

™ lb., Act. IV. m lb., Act II. 

& Foma Gordyeeff, tr. Hapgood, 343. 

59 Night Refuge, Act II. ea lb., Act III. 



356 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

work of his hand and brow. M-an ! phenomenal, how 
loftily it sounds, M-a-n." 61 

The skeptico-humanistic ideals thus represented by 
those who toil and suffer seem to express the thought 
that there is no truth in the social order as now con- 
stituted, just as perhaps there may be no truth in the 
organized life of man. Assemble men, and you may 
get utility, but you fail to secure insight into the truth 
of life, as this slumbers in the individual. In the light 
of these intense ideals, it may further be assumed that 
the pursuit of commerce without the quest of culture 
is in vain; for, while work is a part of life, the impor- 
tant thing for man is to discover why he lives and 
works. Where culture should arrange and organize life, 
society has used its blind powers to construct a prison 
rather than a dwelling. The individual has thus been 
brought to the place where he is led to doubt most 
deeply that which is apparently most useful to him in 
his life; that is industrial activity in its socialized form. 
Were we a generation of artists, or were the present 
generation characterized by aesthetical rather than by 
utilitarian ideals, we might understand the skepticism 
which now clouds our brows and halts our hands ; for 
beauty, however entertaining it may be, does not seem 
to supply our minds with sufficient content for credence, 
or such clearness of form as to assume the character 
of the convincing. But our life-ideal is that of utility, 
something good and right at hand; and yet the intel- 
lectual product of the industrial age is such as to throw 
dust into the eyes, so that we do not believe in what 
we are doing. It is thus the truth of the social order, 
not the mere value and advantage of it, which comes 
in for the cynical skepticism of those who are most 
perfectly identified with the industrial organization of 
life. The individual has shown his ability to live with- 

« Night Refuge, Act IV. 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 357 

out joy, has demonstrated the fact that he can endure 
without the sense of worth, but he has still to show us 
that he can live and labor without truth. 

The primary and most urgent need of the individual 
is a place in the sun, for the children of the sun cannot 
work and endure without knowing the meaning of life 
as such. What reason for existence, what motive for 
work is forthcoming from the philosophy of industrial- 
ism? At best, industrialism can do no more than point 
out the obvious fact that work is necessary for man, 
just as it may add to this deterministic contention the 
more acceptable thought that work may be a means of 
happiness also, if not likewise a source of insight into 
the causal world in which man has his being, in which 
he is supposed to find his destiny. That society is not 
the place of joys and values is a truth which individual- 
ism has been forced to recognize, but the worst threat 
of industrial life is expressed when that form of living 
shows the tendency to invade, not vein and nerve alone, 
but the brain itself. It involves a kind of renunciation 
which even the most ascetic of religions has not at- 
tempted to ask of the devotee, the surrender of life's 
meaning. The Buddhist has never been called upon to 
relinquish insight into the meaning of his earth-life; 
indeed, Buddhism thinks to follow the path of renun- 
ciation for the very purpose of coming to an under- 
standing with the world. Now socially organized in- 
dustrialism, upon which the age prides itself, involves 
more self -relinquishment, more self-deception than the 
most exacting of spiritual religions. 

Perhaps industrialism, with its close affiliation with 
science, has been assuming that man may rejoice in 
truth, except that his culture of truth must now content 
itself with terrestrial affairs as these are presented in 
a pluralistic and practical fashion. The brain which 
has interpreted nature in such a manner and to such a 



358 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

degree of sufficiency as to have brought forth and put 
into operation the industrial machinery of modern life, 
may not feel the sense of guilt when, as is now the case 
in society, it is asserted that man has so lost the sense 
of life as to be suffering for want of truth. But the 
kind of knowledge which applied scientism has fur- 
nished is ill qualified to furnish the individual with that 
kind of truth which is supposed to make man free. 
Scientific insight does supply what Schopenhauer calls 
" knowledge of the Will-to-L,ive," but does not follow 
Schopenhauer when he demands of art, ethics, and 
religion to deliver the soul from such deterministic 
knowing. At the same time, it may be pointed out 
that, whatever scientism was supposed to do, the result 
of its application to the actual life of mankind has been 
to cloud the minds of those who have handled it most 
faithfully. The individual needs to know what he is 
doing, but the knowledge which has come forth from 
scientism has either gone back into nature, to render 
intelligible the workings of inorganic matter and the 
behaviour of organisms, or it has been incorporated into 
machines whose aspect is to the worker no more intel- 
ligible than the smile of the Sphinx. 

The plight of the individual seems to be due to the 
fact that knowledge has been thrust to the poles of the 
abstract here, the concrete there; the temperate zones 
of human existence have not been allowed to see their 
own sun. There is truth in thinking, and there is truth 
in doing; none the less is there truth in living. One 
may know " things " without thus knowing the scheme 
of which they are a part; may know men, without 
knowing humanity. When philosophy insisted that 
knowledge could come only as one cultivated the ab- 
stract, one could justly claim that the scholastic had 
sundered man from himself; and when, as is now the 
case, it is assumed that knowledge can grasp nought 



THE REPUDIATION OF SOCIALITY 359 

but the perceptible and practical, we find men complain- 
ing that again they have been torn from their own lives. 
To be convinced that man has indeed lost the sense of 
life, we need only observe how perplexed is man when 
he seeks to answer the questions, What is being one's 
self? What is the obvious meaning of the social organ- 
ization of individuals? The ego does not know the ego; 
society does not know society; the light within is but 
darkness. In spite of this actual ignorance of things 
humanistic, in spite of the skepticism, it may be pointed 
out that, while the individual is disposed to view him- 
self and his social environment with intellectual despair, 
he is still possessed of the thought that truth has the 
power to redeem man from any actual condition to 
which he may seek. Man does not doubt humanity, 
even where he is intensely skeptical about his present 
condition. It is on this account that the individual 
seeks, not social joy and social worth alone, but social 
truth also ; the individual demands that society shall 
feed, clothe, and shelter, and that it shall likewise supply 
the mind with knowledge of social life as such. 



BOOK THREE 
THE HIGHER SYNTHESIS 



BOOK THREE 
THE HIGHER SYNTHESIS 

WHERE, now, do we stand, what have we to 
do, what must we think? If the formal in- 
dividualism of the Enlightenment led to the 
self-expulsion of the ego, the real individualism of the 
nineteenth century has led to the self-assertion of the 
individual by means of the anti-natural and anti-social. 
Where the earlier movement found the individual exer- 
cising imaginary control of the physical and political, 
the later development of the individualistic doctrine 
views the ego endeavoring to secure real control of its 
soul-states, volitions, and ideas. The attempt to dis- 
cover the ground and goal of human life called upon 
the individual for aesthetic decadence, immoralistic 
pessimism, and irrationalistic irreligion, a triple move- 
ment by means of which the individual asserted his 
destiny in the natural order, his dignity in the social 
one. For the self to come into being, it was doubtless 
necessary for the egoist to assume an anti-natural and 
anti-social attitude; but, for individualism to remain in 
this polemical condition, in which he is ever threatened 
by self-skepticism and self-renunciation, is intolerable, 
if not impossible. Individualism is certainly a means 
to an end, whence the " I think," the " I will," and the 
" I am " may lead the human soul to genuine existence 
in nature, genuine work in humanity; but isolated self- 
hood, however rich its inner content, cannot be regarded 
as the supreme end of human existence. For this rea- 
son, philosophy of life is called upon to elaborate a 
higher synthesis in the light of which the inner self 
may find its true objective; the lower synthesis found 
the self as a mere atom in the physical order, a mere 



364 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

member of the social one, so that it is only by advancing 
to a trans-scientific view of nature and a trans-social 
conception of humanity that the self may be properly 
objectified. 

However complicated the philosophy of life may 
appear to be, its problems, when surveyed from the 
standpoint of the individual which lives and enjoys 
that "life," fall naturally into questions concerning the 
enjoyment, expression, and realization of that life as 
something which has its ground and goal within the self. 
Nothing would seem to be more obvious for man than 
to say, " I think," " I will," " I am " ; yet the compli- 
cations of scientific thinking and social doing have long 
been such as to obscure the true life-issue. With a vast 
array of ideas, the individual finds none that he may 
call his own; with an equally impressive display of 
motives within him, there is no work which may be 
done personally; in like manner, the ultimate significance 
of existence is not for him. Where psycho-physical mon- 
ism ever tended to forbid independent existence, spon- 
taneous action, and independent thought, scientifico-social 
monism has been even more inimical to that which the 
self would esteem its own. This monism has reckoned 
without its host; it has perfected a view of the world 
by leaving the ego outside the wall, so that it presents 
the view of a house without a tenant. In response to 
this walling up of the world, individualism set up a rival 
camp in which the ego devoted itself to its own exist- 
ence, own impulses, own ideas, as these appeared in 
aestheticism, immoralism, and irreligion. Now genuine 
individualism concludes that both views are wrong; 
philosophy of life can be neither monistic nor egoistic. 
For this reason, individualism takes up the problem of 
the higher synthesis for the purpose of showing how a 
liberal view of the exterior world of both things and 
persons may justly be regarded as the place of enjoy- 



THE HIGHER SYNTHESIS 365 

ment, of worth, and of truth. Such enjoyment is now 
to be considered aesthetically, as that which leads to 
a philosophy of culture, while the problem of worth 
assumes the form of a philosophy of action which fur- 
ther involves a philosophy of the state, just as the prob- 
lem of truth makes necessary a theory of knowledge 
and a philosophy of religion. 



PART ONE 
THE JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 

THE elaboration of a philosophy of life carries 
with it the temptation to make that philosophy 
consist of either thinking or doing, metaphysics 
or morality; at the same time, a genuine philosophic 
should concern itself with the unity of these two in a 
study of the world without and life within. When the 
speculative and practical are combined, the fusion of 
the two produces something new in the form of feeling, 
whence to the sense of truth and worth in human exist- 
ence there are to be added certain dialectical convictions 
as to the veritable joy of life. In the history of indi- 
vidualism, the joy of life has been put to the test of 
outward pleasure and inward joy; for individualism has 
included both self-love and self-culture. As individual- 
ism seeks the higher synthesis of the self with the world 
and humanity, it now finds it necessary to revise its 
conception of life-joy, so that pleasure in things and 
joy in inward experiences may give way to a more per- 
fect, more permanent sense of human happiness. This 
joy of life is none the less the individual's, and it is by 
means of, rather than in spite of, the self that the joy 
of life is to be made convincing. Thus, individualism, 
having observed the anti-naturalism and anti-sociality 
of the egoistic movement, must now attempt to make 
satisfactory answer to the question what being one's self 
really means. When the essence of selfhood is thus 
determined, a new individualism will be in a position to 
examine the possibilities of that higher synthesis of life 
which seem to lurk in the aesthetic consciousness of 
humanity. Hence, the larger discussion of the joy of 
life must include a study of selfhood and life- joy, the 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 367 

aesthetic synthesis of humanity and the question of 
culture. Is is possible for the joy of life to relate the 
individual to the objective orders of nature here and 
humanity there? The bond between the self on the one 
hand and science and sociality on the other has been 
broken; may another bond be substituted for it? 

I. ONE'S OWN LIFE 

Individualism has been brought to the realization that 
one cannot be himself within himself, through himself, 
and by making the self the end of life. At the same 
time, when philosophy of life attempts to settle accounts 
with individualism, it realizes that selfhood must be 
construed in such a manner as to preserve the integrity 
of the soul-state, the independence of the will's initiative, 
and the ideal character of the self as such. Yet, while 
maintaining the uniqueness of that which is within, goes 
on within, and expresses itself from within, one may 
seek the ground and goal of human life without using 
this triple contention for the purpose of negating nature 
or neutralizing society. If individualism was right in 
resorting to an irrationalism which delivered the self 
from scientism, and in asserting an immoralism which 
saved the self from sociality, individualism was right 
only in a temporary and relative sense, so that one must 
seek the ground and goal of life in something beyond 
individualism. If the ground of life is not to be found 
in naturalism as interpreted by scientific thought, if the 
goal does not appear in a sociality of scientific origin, 
it may hardly be assumed that the ground and goal will 
become manifest in anti-naturalism or anti-social ideal- 
ism. At the same time, individualism is not called upon 
to surrender the self or even to retreat from the position 
which it has won ; rather must individualism be more 
emphatic in its self-assertion, while it must go even 



368 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

farther forward into the depths of human life. Man 
must be viewed as human ; the individual must be allowed 
to have and to enjoy his own life. 

i. Egoism and Individualism 

In asserting the obvious fact that the individual has 
his own life which he is expected to live, we must run 
the risk of repetition and again assert that all those 
moralists who start out with the rationalistic assump- 
tion that life begins with selfhood in both nature and 
humanity are guilty of that posterior prius for which 
the Enlightenment was famous. The Enlightenment 
assumed that the lower had come from the higher, the 
imperfect from the perfect; thus, the Enlightenment 
assumed that law had come from a rational sense of 
rights, established worship from a pure sense of re- 
ligion, social morality from the condescending benevo- 
lence of free individuals. The historical facts and rela- 
tions in the case seem to be exactly the opposite: first 
come law, worship, and conventional morality; whence, 
at a later period, are asserted rights, spiritual religion, 
and individualistic ethics. In this reversal of the En- 
lightenment's reasoning, the nineteenth century was led 
to assert that the ego came from society, not society 
from the ego, and the free condition of life in accord- 
ance with which each lives his own life cannot be found 
in the past, but in the future. The human self has not 
yet appeared, but it should appear in the course of time. 

Far from taking the self for granted, individualism 
ever asserted that the self can come into being only as 
the ego insists upon his own inner life, asserts his self- 
willed volitions, and posits his own selfhood. If the 
self exists so thoroughly, as the Enlightenment had 
insisted, why should individualism resort to such vigor- 
ous and vicious measures to bring the self into being? 
If, like Descartes, one is sure of the self but doubtful 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 369 

about the exterior world; if, like Hobbes, one is con- 
vinced of the ego but anxious about society, why should 
he adopt the extreme individualistic measures which 
with individualism were the measures of irrationalism 
and immoralism? Irrationalism was resorted to by the 
individualist like Stirner because the individualist real- 
ized that the exterior world had the upper hand; im- 
moralism was asserted by Nietzsche because the indi- 
vidualist saw that his cause was nothing in the eyes of 
the social order. According to individualism, reason is a 
snare, morality a yoke; when reason becomes scientism, 
the snare is doubly meshed; when morality becomes 
sociality, the yoke is no longer of wood but of iron. 
The aim of individualism has been to escape from the 
scientific snare, to extricate the neck from the social 
yoke. Hence, for every extreme to which the individ- 
ualist has gone, there is a reason, a justification. 

That upon which the individualistic egoist has insisted 
in connection with the proposition, " The individual has 
his own life," has had to do with the independence of 
soul-states and the freedom of the inner life. In assert- 
ing such inwardness, egoism has sought the joy of life 
in the midst of his soul-states rather than the particular 
pleasures which come from commerce with things of 
the world; at the same time, the egoist has endeavored 
to preserve his precious inner being instead of pouring 
it out upon that anonymous thing called society. The 
joy in one's soul-states led the individual to aestheticism ; 
the desire to be individual rather than social resulted in 
decadence. The egoism of the enlightenment was no 
less selfish, for the egoism of this period sought the 
pleasure of sensuous objects, while it endeavored to 
make these sensuous joys universal. In this, early ego- 
ism sought to come to an understanding with nature, 
which it used for the sake of those particular pleasures 
which nature could bestow ; in the same manner, ego- 



370 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ism sought to settle accounts with the social order by 
arranging for a general distribution of this world's 
goods. Utilitarianism expressed this genial notion when 
it set up its crass ideal, " The greatest happiness of the 
greatest number." But suppose the moralist is dealing 
in satisfactions which do not come from the world 
without but from the self within; how then can these 
internal benefits be divided and shared? Does not ego- 
ism have to its credit the idea that it is seeking only 
those experiences in life which are noble in their in- 
wardness, and is not altruism to be blamed for its 
universal selfishness? 

Where once it was the conflict between egoism and 
altruism, it is now the strife between individualism and 
social existence. The difference between the two prob- 
lems will appear as soon as one observes that individ- 
ualism, far from continuing the assumption that one 
seeks his own pleasure when he should endeavor to 
promote the pleasures of others, now insists that it is 
better to emphasize inner life within the self than outer 
existence in the social order. In accordance with the 
conditions of the new dualism, it is insisted that intel- 
lectualism is superior to industrialism, culture to com- 
merce, humanity to sociality. Far from urging his 
own cause as mere egoism, the individualist asserts the 
supremacy of selfhood in order that the genuine values 
of life may be conserved. Let sociality maintain its 
sway and, while the exterior condition of man might be 
better for the time being, the life-values of art, science, 
and philosophy would be called upon to suffer, since 
they depend upon the isolated activity of the cultured 
individual aiming at ideal satisfaction in his own life. 
For this reason, altruism cannot be employed as an 
offset to individualistic egoism; for, where altruism 
aims at exterior benefits, individualism is interested in 
soul-states and life-ideals. To seek the pleasure of 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 371 

another or the material welfare of society is to seek 
such pleasure and benefit in a region which does not 
appeal to the individual ; such an individual may be an 
aesthete or a decadent, but he does not seek to compete 
with those whose life-aim is material benefit. It is 
apparent in the general conditions of ethics and culture 
to-day that individualism stands in need of some cor- 
rective, whether purification of its principles or the 
extension of its ideals ; but such a corrective is not to 
be found in any system of social ethics in which the 
needs of the inner life are neglected for the sake of 
ameliorating the exterior situation. Furthermore, indi- 
vidualism must be the physician who heals himself. 

The opponent of individualism, in his perverse as- 
sumption that the self may be taken for granted, makes 
the confusion still more disconcerting when he further 
presumes that it is the aim of the individual to dictate 
to the world and domineer over the social order. In- 
stead of such offensiveness on the part of individualism, 
the ego has for a century been on the defensive in a 
conflict for the true ground and worthy goal of human 
life. That which the ego strives to do is to assert him- 
self as such, whence he may call his soul, not nature's 
or society's, but his own. In this manner, the struggle 
for selfhood has been little else than a struggle for the 
conservation of the inner life; and, while this inner life 
might perhaps be expressed in some other manner, as 
is the case with such a thinker as Eucken, it seems as 
though the definite meaning and intrinsic value of that 
life might become clearer when the thinker uses the 
idea of selfhood in particular to indicate inner life 
in general. When one says, " spiritual life — Geistes- 
leben," inner experience does not always assure us that 
we have grasped the idea in question; furthermore, the 
idea of inner life may be treated in such an effeminate 
manner that it will soon be discountenanced by the force- 



21 



372 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



ful and ponderous contentions of scientism and social- 
ity, where the inner life of a defiant egoism is not so 
easily overcome. Indeed, the inner life of the self is 
sometimes something to be dreaded, whence as one may 
observe in the case of Nordau, it becomes necessary for 
the scientifico-social thinker to adopt tactics of defense 
against a Stirner and an Ibsen, a Nietzsche and a Strind- 
berg. Against these, no law of altruism can prevail. 

Far from being premised as a fact, " one's own life " 
is merely postulated as an ideal. In striving after such 
an idea, the individualist has adopted as one of his 
methods that of aestheticism. While the aesthetic 
method might seem eminently weak, it now appears 
that, when the self takes its stand upon its feelings and 
tastes, it is not easily dislodged. Let the egoist avail 
himself of moral motives or metaphysical principles in 
the assertion of his selfhood, and all the exterior forces 
of sociality and scientism are arrayed against him; but 
when the argument is aesthetical, these dull weapons 
fail to cut. Walled without by a militant aestheticism, 
the individualist is none the less armed within; his feel- 
ings give him a peculiar sense of selfhood, where his 
volitions and ideas are likely to go forth from within 
and mingle with the clamor of common moralistic and 
metaphysical forces. If the individual enjoys his own 
inner life, it is fair to assume that that life is his own; 
enjoyment is by nature so internal, so characteristic 
that it is not likely to suffer from that scientific and 
social objectification which has played havoc with recent 
ideals. Because individualism has instinctively adopted 
the aesthetic and eudaemonistic method, it has expressed 
itself in art, as in decadent poetry, in the realistic novel, 
and in the immoralistic drama. There is indeed an 
ethics of individualism, as also a logic; but the earliest 
and most characteristic of individualistic arguments was 
expressed in an aesthetic manner. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 373 

The all-desired distinction between the old egoism 
and the new individualism will appear more clearly 
when we observe how the contrast between the quanti- 
tative and qualitative here applies. That which egoism 
sought for the human self, was the enjoyment of as 
much pleasure as the self would contain, while that 
which altruism was willing to allow was the gratifi- 
cation of as many desires as might be possible for the 
ego in the social state. At heart, there was no ethical 
difference between the ideals of egoism and altruism ; 
both aimed at the idea of exterior enjoyment, but where 
egoism sought all, altruism could see its way clear to 
permit only some of this objective happiness. In oppo- 
sition to this quantitative and extensive conception of 
happiness, individualism lays stress on the intensive 
quality of the feeling which the self would enjoy. No 
matter to what minimum the self might seek to limit 
his desires, if these were to consist in the enjoyment of 
things, individualism could not give its consent to the 
life-program; on the other hand, where the enjoyment 
was the ideal gratification of soul-states known to the 
man of culture, individualism could not find it in its 
heart to say that these interior enjoyments should be 
limited for the sake of others. Thus, it was the quan- 
titative within limits here and the qualitative without 
limits there which characterized the egoistic and indi- 
vidualistic respectively. Taking its stand upon the in- 
tensive and qualitative, individualism was unwilling to 
suffer the ego to be enclosed by any objectively altru- 
istic system. 

Where the ideal of quantity of life gave place to that 
of quality of life, individualism as such did not fail to 
suffer from an excess of intension, from the attempt to 
apply to the soul too many subjective attributes. In 
this manner, individualism became over-fine and extra- 
delicate, as one may see from the character of Schlegel's 



374 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Lucinde, Huysmans' Des Esseintes, and Wilde's Dorian 
Gray, who became aesthetical and precieuse. Now, 
when one seeks the ground and goal of life in that 
which is inwardly removed from the scientific and the 
social, he must become aware of the extreme fineness 
of the individualistic doctrine. If he cannot convinc- 
ingly repudiate it, he may firmly reject it; meanwhile, 
he can show from the history of individualism that 
aestheticism carried to the extreme point of which it 
was capable has been unable to sustain the responsi- 
bilities of human selfhood, still less to relate selfhood 
to nature and humanity without. To prepare the self 
for its entrance into the exterior order and to effect the 
cure of subjectivism, philosophy of life must have in 
the self a worthy candidate. Individualism was right 
in separating the self from the minor world-orders of 
scientism and sociality, but when individualism devel- 
oped selfhood to the extreme of aestheticism and deca- 
dence, it made its argument too good to be true. Just 
individualism separates the self from the special formu- 
lations of the exterior order as these appear in scientism 
and sociality, but such individualism does not thereby 
divorce the self from the exterior orders of nature and 
humanity. 

2. Naturistic Possibilities of Selfhood 

When individualism seeks to sever its connection with 
anti-natural decadence, it is led to wonder how it will 
be possible for the future ideal of selfhood to assert 
itself in the omnipotent natural order. As long as anti- 
natural individualism kept out of the exterior order, as 
it did in the irrationalism of Stirner and the decadence 
of Huysmans, it was not difficult for the ego to believe 
in its selfhood; but, when the validity of the natural is 
recognized, the synthetic and continuous character of 
the world seems to make all attempts at private exist- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 375 

ence in vain. The conception of nature which obtained 
in the Enlightenment was so static and rationalistic that 
the human self was able to feel more or less at home 
in the exterior order. How far apart are now the forces 
of naturism and individualism ! Yet, in the midst of 
the melancholy distance between the outer world and 
the inner life, individualism is cheered by the conscious- 
ness that the sense of selfhood is so clear and convincing 
that it seems to have just begun its career in the world. 
While the world of nature has nothing to offer the self, 
not a crumb of metaphysical or moral comfort, the self 
rejoices in a burning, shining inner light, and asserts its 
independence of the whole exterior order. But how is 
individualism to make peace with the world, how cast 
its shadow in the objective order? 

The conflict between the world and the self has been 
a strident one, because neither would give any place to 
the other. Where scientism cast out all spiritual ideals, 
aestheticism was just as ready to neutralize all natural 
notions and motives. In the domain of literature, the 
temporary triumph of scientism was observed in the 
artist's readiness to indulge in descriptions of exact 
detail without any improvising activity of his imagina- 
tion, while the forces which were allowed to control the 
action of the drama or the plot of the romance were, 
borrowed from scientism, and assumed the special form 
of heredity or environment. That such realism no 
longer holds sway one may see from the rise of the 
neo-romantic movement of the twentieth century; ex- 
terior facts and forces are now secondary to the spon- 
taneous activity of the human soul. The ideal of life 
is still that of individualism, but an individualism in 
which the splenetic and vicious have given place to that 
which is more healthy and natural. From the indica- 
tions afforded by contemporary art, one may go so far 
as to assume that individualism has at last found it 



376 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

possible to enjoy the inner life and assert the self, no 
longer in decadent defiance of the world, but in con- 
nection with the natural order. At last it is appreciated 
that the universe is capable of containing both the world 
and the self; for, as the world is much more than sci- 
entism, so the self as self is more normal than the soli- 
taire of the decadent school. With a new conception 
of the world and a purified ideal of selfhood, by what 
means may the two be brought to an understanding, so 
that one shall live his own very life in the objective 
order ? 

In trying to replace the human self in the world for 
which that self had such decadent disdain, it may not 
be possible to discover the true dialectic which shall 
justify the assertion that one can now be himself with- 
out resorting to the extreme of anti-naturalism : again, 
such a dialectic of life may be unnecessary when one 
is inwardly convinced that there is a living synthesis of 
these one-time opposites. Nevertheless, the place where 
that higher synthesis is to be made may be indicated, 
just as the method of perfecting it may be pointed out. 
One must live his own life; of that, individualism is 
now convinced. But one must live that life, not in an 
ivory tower of Romanticism, not in a maisonette of 
Decadence, but in the free of the world. The claims 
of the self are no greater than the claims of the world, 
and vice versa. In the readjustment of the self and the 
world, it is well to consider how human thought has laid 
its emphasis first here, then there. 

According to the rationalism of early modern thought, 
it was asserted that ideas determine things ; realism 
retorted to this by contending that things determine 
ideas. In the case of the human mind, which is neither 
angelic nor animalistic, it would seem as though there 
were truth on both sides of the dualism. When one 
takes the rationalistic point of view, and thus asserts 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 377 

the supremacy of the idea over the thing, he is always 
puzzled to explain how ideas within the mind should 
conform to things in the world; when one takes the 
realistic point of view, he is at a loss to account for 
the agreement of things without and ideas within. The 
rationalist is forced to admit that experience has some- 
thing to do with the production of ideas, while the real- 
ist cannot deny the presence of the a priori within the 
mind. Schelling, whose System of Identity made note 
of this situation in philosophy, sought relief in the notion 
of aesthetic monism; individualism may perhaps solve 
the problem without the aid of a method which finds 
thought and thing to be the expression of some third 
and unknown entity. With individualism, it is the idea 
of the ego within its own world which tends to do away 
with the dualism of subject and object; at the same 
time, the problem, instead of being a formal one for 
thought, is a real one for life, since it has to do with 
the relation of the inner self to the exterior order. In 
what way can the aesthetic ideal serve the purposes of 
that reunion of the self and the world which philosophy 
is now seeking? 

Where the question of One's Own Work and One's 
Own Self must re-establish the relation of the ego with 
nature in their own manner, the problem of One's Own 
Life bases its solution of the question upon the idea of 
enjoyment. The self is in a world-order which seems 
to be alien to its nature and inimical to its strivings; 
to assert rationalism is to lose the world, while to sub- 
mit to realism is to lose the self; but to assume eudae- 
monism is to save both the self and the world. The 
practical working out of eudaemonism has to do with 
the sense of enjoyment which the ego experiences in the 
natural order ; and, where there is that sense of satis- 
faction, it may be assumed that the dualism of the self 
and the world is overcome. The self makes the world 



378 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

its own, not by thinking of the world in the form of 
ideas, not by accepting the world in the form of things, 
but by enjoying the world as the place where the self 
is at home. In the synthesis of inner and outer, the 
very essence of happiness is to be found, since genuine 
happiness consists in the adaptation of the inner life to 
the outer world. The egoistic hedonist has no self- 
conscious happiness, because he has no self for the 
experiencing of this happiness; the egoistic decadent 
has no joy of life, since he has no world to which the 
inward sense of happiness can correspond; but the true 
individualist finds in his complete life- joy something 
which makes for both delight and dialectics at the same 
time, inasmuch as his complete sense of happiness is an 
assurance that he is one with the world. Such happi- 
ness, while wanting in the technique of logic, is signifi- 
cant of that harmony of inner and outer which logic 
aims to promote in the form of judgment. 

Where scientism attempts to forbid the inner life, 
whence individualism finds it necessary to resort to 
decadence for its deliverance, the same conflict reap- 
pears when the self seeks to add to its idea of inward- 
ness that of freedom. According to the dualism which 
results from the competitive claims of libertarianism 
and determinism, one must choose between liberty and 
law, so that, where there is freedom there is no causal- 
ity, where there is causality there is no freedom. One 
might perhaps imitate Kant and thus divide the field 
between freedom and law, but the result would only be 
the same dualism in another form. When one puts forth 
an ethical argument, he arrives at the idea of freedom; 
when he makes use of physical reasoning, the result is 
causality. Here, one is conscious of freedom; there, he 
is aware of law. The difficulty in this case is parallel 
to the difficulty encountered when individualism sought 
to save both the inner life and the outer world, and as 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 379 

thought seemed to threaten things, so freedom tends to 
violate law, and as things neutralize thought, so law 
vitiates the meaning of human spontaneity. Where, in 
the case of inner life and outer world, individualism 
rested its case upon the idea of an enjoyment which 
enabled the self to pass out from its states within to the 
things of the exterior order, now, in the case of free- 
dom, individualism makes use of the idea of creative- 
ness for the purpose of showing how the self may im- 
press its will upon the world. In this manner, the right 
to enjoy the world and the freedom of working therein 
appear as the essentials of one's own life. Anything 
less would leave the self in mere positivism ; anything 
more would cause the ego to return to a decadence 
where the inner life was morbid, while the will was 
vicious. 

In contrast with the libertarian conception of free- 
dom, the ideal of freedom as creativeness has the ad- 
vantage of demonstrating its reality in the world. It is 
true that the libertarian could always point to ethical 
acts which have about them a certain air of freedom, 
but the actual works of creative freedom are far more 
palpable and permanent. By appealing to the sense of 
creative freedom, one may indicate the whole system of 
human work as this appears in civilization without and 
culture within. Upon the basis of determinism, it 
would indeed be difficult to understand how mankind 
could have taken up the burden of a specifically human 
work, and have perfected this in the complete manner 
incident upon the history of humanity. If one still feels 
that natural causation is responsible for all that has 
taken place in the world, let him hypothetically eliminate 
the spontaneity of the human soul and then attempt to 
account for such a thing as Greek tragedy or Gothic 
architecture. That nature can somehow invent forms 
of plant and animal life by means of natural selection 



380 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

is not to be questioned for a moment; but that nature 
can use the same principle for the perfection of the 
human species, and then in a derivative manner employ 
that principle for the perfection of some definite art- 
work is too much to ask of her. The reason why deter- 
minism has been able to give a quasi-explanation of 
human activity is because it has assumed responsibility 
for nothing more serious than the isolated act of the 
average man; when the creative work of human genius 
is presented as the problem for explanation, the naive 
methods of determinism fall to the ground. By appeal- 
ing to this sense of creativeness, as he has previously 
referred to the sense of enjoyment, the individual may 
construct an argument for the independence of the 
human self in the world. 

To be joyous and creative, then, are means by which 
the ego escapes the quasi-solipsism of the decadent 
school; and it is only in such quarters that one finds 
the faintest trace of that solipsistic danger upon which 
academic philosophy has laid such stress. Apart from 
aesthetics, and perhaps religion also, there is no possi- 
bility of solipsism; metaphysics and morality are too 
thoroughly occupied with things and duties to make 
such a conclusion possible. Now solipsism, in its living, 
aesthetic form, has been the means of redeeming the 
human self from the hands of its naturistic enemies ; 
for, when the ego retired to the depths of its private 
melancholy, there was no way of eliciting it from with- 
out. Nevertheless, individualism has no desire to fur- 
ther solipsism, so that individualism will do no more 
than hold it in reserve in case the forces of naturalism 
make a renewed attempt to render the whole world 
objective and impersonal; individualism is anxious to 
prove no more than the existence of the self in the 
world. This is to be done by delivering the self from 
the species. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 381 

To perfect generalizations has been one of the think- 
er's favorite occupations ever since the days of Socra- 
tes. Working both deductively and inductively, human 
thought has longed to draw its circles about the various 
objects of nature, which seemed strangely adapted to 
the class-groups so readily established. In the case of 
man, the scientific-social generalization appeared quite 
attractive, so that most individuals were ready to be 
assembled under the head of the species or society. It 
was at this point that decadence showed itself to be of 
genuine value, since it was decadence which resisted the 
generalization and urged the individual to take his stand 
outside the conceptual circle, to build without the wall. 
The place where the scientific treatment of man failed 
was where that treatment, strengthened by its classifi- 
cation of plants and animals, sought to impose the same 
formal and objective methods upon humanity. Now, in 
humanity, the species fails to show that measure of 
supremacy which appears so strikingly in the animal 
order; where, with the animal, the species determines 
the specimen, in humanity the specimen often deter- 
mines the species. This is due to the fact that man, who 
lives a form of life somewhat detached from nature, is 
possessed of a life-content which can be realized by 
the exceptional individual rather than the mass ; whence 
a Plato, a Shakespeare, or a Goethe will give to the 
species far more than he receives. Scientific thought 
can make headway only as it ignores this content, but 
in so doing, scientific thought leaves out the meaning of 
the problem which it is trying to solve. The self-assert- 
ing individual either breaks the conceptual circle or rises 
above it to a higher synthesis. 

To all those who persist in pursuing the biological 
analogy, individualism must insist upon the intrinsic 
content of human life wherein happiness and creative- 
ness serve to show how independent of the species the 



382 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

individual may be. Granted that there are such super- 
ficial likenesses among the children of men whereby one 
might seek to include all under one head, there still 
remains the fact that individuals and races are conscious 
of the differences between themselves and others, so that 
the anthropological generalization is usually wanting in 
the content of genuine human life. Observe the innate 
difference between Aryan and Semite as shown in lan- 
guage and habits of thinking; contrast the oriental with 
the occidental, the German with the Slav; note how 
mankind experiences the warfare of class with class, 
sex with sex, and you will scarce be able to credit the 
idea that of all these varieties there is a fundamental 
unity. To find that unity, one must penetrate beneath 
the surface of the anthropological and lay hold of that 
which is essential to humanity, and it is in the essential 
that the individual lives and enjoys his own life. 

The physical possibilities of selfhood would seem to 
be limitless, and it is only because our thought has 
resorted to cramping and trimming that we have been 
led to feel that life has no place for the independent life 
of the human ego. At the worst, nature is only indif- 
ferent to the existence and enjoyment of the inner life 
of the individual ; for such individualism, nature pro- 
vides due form and adequate content. According to the 
principle of individuation, as this appears in the natural 
order, it is as possible for the individual to have his own 
life as it is for him to have his own face. While nature 
may not be monadological, she makes it possible for the 
sum and substance of the world to repeat itself in each 
individual. To this liberality of form, nature has a rich 
content for the ego's life; this appears in the manifold 
of impressions which come from without and the vast 
array of impulses which spring from within, so that the 
ego never lacks for variety of life-experience or life- 
expression. To eliminate the individual, as scientism 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 383 

endeavors to do, would be to defeat the obvious plan of 
the world, so that the ardent individualist may still be 
friendly to nature, even where his attitude may be the 
anti-scientific one. Art has learned to survey the spec- 
tacle of nature apart from the formalities of scientism; 
why should philosophy hesitate to follow her example? 

3. Social Possibilities of Selfhood 

In contrast with the optimistic assumption that the 
individual is in complete possession of the outer social 
order, individualism indulges in a pessimism which 
brings it to the realization that it is society which is in 
possession of the world in which the ego is trying to 
exist. This same pessimism led the individualist to see 
how thoroughly was the human self at the mercy of the 
naturalistic order of scientism, and it was upon the pes- 
simistic basis that individualism made its anti-natural, 
anti-social revolt. To comprehend the individualistic 
situation, one must have sense and taste for the strong 
pessimism in which this is couched. Not for a moment 
does the individual pretend to either solipsism in the 
natural order or egoism in the social one; the individual 
smiles, and that somewhat scornfully, when he sees these 
devotees of modern scientism and sociality as they en- 
deavor to combat the supposedly solipsistic situation, 
according to which the human self seems to forbid the 
existence of things, and the egoistic arrangement in the 
light of which this same self seems to defy the existence 
of the social order. To be solipsistic toward nature and 
egoistic toward society has ever been far from the indi- 
vidual's power; and no one but the individualist realizes 
that there is in the human self but the least trace of that 
sense of selfhood which might lead to the solipsism of 
" I am " and the egoism of " I will." Would that there 
might come upon contemporary culture a renewed sense 
of inner life whereby the solipsistic and egoistic should 



384 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

" threaten " our absurd ideals. Our greatest need at the 
present hour is a touch of solipsistic egoism. 

The social situation, with its relentless anti-egoism, is 
such as to demand conformity of all individuals, so that 
one might easily believe that the inhabitants of the earth 
were so many bodies without souls, so many pairs of 
hands without wills to direct them. With the social 
organization of life and labor, all power of initiative, 
all will to improvise, has been strangled. At first, ma- 
chinery was applied to work, with the effect of lowering 
action from the higher centres of the brain to the lower 
centres of the nervous system; then, with the introduc- 
tion of " efficiency," the organizing movement invaded 
the brain itself and made life doubly mechanical and 
only half as valuable as it was before. The present situ- 
ation is bad in the extreme ; why ? because it does not 
offer the individual the opportunity to live his own life. 
It will of course be said that " life " is better now than 
it was a century ago, that people are more wealthy and 
have greater opportunities ; but what is this mysterious 
"life" that is neither thine nor mine? Yet what is to 
be done? It is not for philosophy to attempt any prac- 
tical solution of the industrial problem, and it may be 
that only life itself in its thoughtless progress holds the 
secret of the situation. But philosophy can and must 
always identify life-ideals, so that it is upon the author- 
ity of philosophy that one is able to conclude that life 
is true or false, good or bad according to its ability to 
evince selfhood in humanity. Where one upholds re- 
actionism, where one points to some sort of utopianism, 
he indicates the fact that the present situation is intoler- 
able in that it fails to make room for the existence and 
enjoyment of inner life. Thus, it is upon the individual 
that philosophy of life places its affair. 

The outer struggle with the social order, as the latter 
is organized industrially, is itself enough of a problem 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 385 

for the ego, but this is only half of the battle ; the social 
method of philosophizing, of moralizing, not content 
with its domination over the self from without, has 
shown a disposition to rule the self from within. The 
ardent individual, expecting the realization of selfhood's 
promise both without and within, is dismayed when he 
finds that the world has been taken from him; but he 
consoles himself with the thought that, within, his own 
soul remains intact in its individuality. He re-enters 
what he is pleased to call his own soul, and to find what ? 
He finds that the sociality which outwardly was a net 
is inwardly a snare. Sociality has first crippled his 
limbs, then infected his blood. This infection appears 
in the sociality of " ethics," whence being good has 
come to mean being social. At the same time, sociality 
has sought complete corruption of inward sentiment; 
whence the individual's moral conscience has become so 
much social sentiment, while his emotions have been 
run into the altruistic channel. Nineteenth-century sci- 
entism is responsible for the quasi-ethical movement 
which has had the effect of taking the self from the 
centre of spiritual life and placing it upon the remote 
periphery. This appears in the scientific treatment of 
conscience and benevolence. 

That scientific ethics has done something toward ex- 
plaining certain characteristics of conscience need not 
be denied even by those who despise the scientific con- 
ception of social life. Yet, in the old conscience, there 
was an element of individualism which the ethics of 
scientific sociality was never able to explain away. From 
the older, individualistic point of view, conscience was 
so much individualistic sentiment in the light of which 
the self saw its own duty as such. Let all the world go 
its way, but as for me I must go according to the dic- 
tates of my own conscience; such was the view-point of 
the older moralist whose life-ideal, when emphasized by 



386 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

action, was anti-social in its character. From the sci- 
entific point of view, the " voice of conscience " was 
nothing but the voice of society, while the sense of 
compunction which resulted from wrong-doing was sup- 
posed to come from the violation of an inward social 
sentiment. The action of the individual seemed to be 
thoroughly individualistic; the explanation of the action 
became clear when it was subjected to social interpre- 
tation. Granted that the average acts of conscience 
may be explained upon the social basis, there are always 
certainly exquisitely ethical acts which depend upon the 
anti-social individual for their validity. At the same 
time, progress from one social period to another is 
always made possible by the individual's violation of 
contemporary standards, whence the individualistic be- 
comes far more important than the social. The moral 
person, Moses, Socrates, Luther, shows his morality by 
repudiating the standard of " goodness " which is set 
for him by the age ; in this manner, non-conformity and 
the violation of the social sanction of morality become 
the very marks of human goodness. 

If conscience is so utterly social, how is the contrite 
individual to live his own life? To be social is to be 
moral ; and yet, with the exalted individual in critical 
circumstances, to be social means to be immoral. In 
this manner, the free-thinker or the reformer satisfies 
his own conscience by violating the conscience of the 
race. He becomes moral only by first becoming im- 
moral. Butler made conscience the equivalent of " rea- 
sonable self-love " ; Darwin viewed it as " reflection and 
sociability " ; that is, where the older master says, " think 
about your self," the newer thinker, the scientist, says, 
" think about the species." Which is right, Butler or 
Darwin? Unable to decide between the methods of the 
rationalist and the scientist, individualism has usually 
decided to go ahead without any conscience at all; the 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 387 

individualist has been at once anti-moral and anti-social. 
Yet, in all this, it must be said that it was the social- 
ization of conscience which gave the individualist cour- 
age to repudiate the moral law, since a morality for 
society's sake could hardly be expected to deter the 
vigorous egoist from violent action. The individualism 
which endeavors to come to an understanding with 
humanity, so that the self shall no longer live as a soli- 
taire or insurrecto, finds it necessary to attempt the 
solution of the conscience-problem. Suppose one grant 
that the individualistic conscience of Butler is in vain; 
suppose he grant further that the Darwinian conscience 
is as practically ineffective as the Butlerian was uncon- 
vincing; what kind of ethical reasoning is now open to 
him? 

The individualist was right in insisting that conscience 
is very largely an affair of one's own ; it is my conscience 
which approves or disapproves. The scientist has been 
right in insisting that conscience is epical as well as 
lyrical, that it relates itself to something outside the 
individual's own private feelings. How may these con- 
tradictory claims be re-adjusted? The individual has 
now come to the place where he is anxious to re-enter 
the humanistic order; but he will not do this unless he 
be allowed to live his own life, which includes the pri- 
vate satisfaction of a personal conscience which has its 
self-styled feelings of approval and disapproval. Now, 
cannot this demand for genuine exteriority of life be 
satisfied when, instead of a narrow, shallow social ideal, 
one postulates the ideal of Humanity? Such a concep- 
tion gives all that one now finds in sociality, and some- 
thing more besides. At the same time, it affords the 
ego adequate objectivity by placing him in an order of 
life in which he may well be at home. Conscience, 
then, would seem to be, not the peevish voice of a petty 
social order, crying out for immediate recognition, but 



2.'. 



388 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the august tones of an ever-living humanity within the 
soul of the individual. 

When the individualist is confronted by this higher 
synthesis of the self and humanity, he has no right to 
complain that his inner life is being torn from him, 
since humanity, while epic and exterior, is of the same 
genus as the individual himself. In the case of the non- 
conformist who violates the social standard for the sake 
of his individualistic ideals, it is possible to reason to 
the effect that, in thus transcending the social order, he 
is but allying himself with an ideal order very like that 
which he finds within his own nature. The reformer 
repudiates the contemporary order, not for the purpose 
of removing order altogether, but with the idea of initi- 
ating a superior one which has not yet appeared, and 
which exists only ideally in his own mind. In the course 
of time, society approximates to this ideal, whereupon 
the enlightened individual outlines a still higher syn- 
thesis, and so on forever. Where the new moral idea 
arises in the spontaneity of the individual's soul, it 
stagnates when it is adopted by all mankind; whence 
renewed spontaneity must come in to make progress 
possible. 

Conscience is sometimes social, sometimes anti-social, 
sometimes individualistic, sometimes anti-individualistic, 
but at all times it is humanistic. The same may be said 
of another ethical problem, that of altruism; here, as 
in the case of conscience, the individual learns how to 
come forth from the seclusion of selfhood, not for the 
purpose of becoming social, but with the idea of being 
thoroughly human. Social thinking has been relentless 
in its treatment of man's ideals, and it is not to be won- 
dered at that revolutionary egoism resorted to the ex- 
treme measures of immoralism and decadence for the 
purpose of evincing the free selfhood of the soul. But 
one is not forced to choose between abject sociality with 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 389 

all its disgusting ideals and decadence with its fatal 
tendencies; one may be human. Individualism has op- 
posed altruism because altruism did no more than pre- 
sent in the alter-ego another being, the ego itself, because 
altruism expected the cultured individual to surrender 
to a purely industrial society, and because altruism over- 
looked the fact that the individual has his own life. 
But the cure of egoism, upon which the higher synthesis 
of life depends, is not to be found in either selfishness 
or sociality : selfishness is the indulgence of each ; social- 
ity, the indulgence of all. 

Individualism escapes from the social predicament by 
postulating humanity with its inwardness in place of 
society with its purely exterior form of existence ; indi- 
vidualism must now escape from altruism by making 
use of the humanistic ideal. In more than one way, 
altruism defeats its own aims. Altruism expects the 
human ego to appreciate the life-situation of the alter- 
ego; but the moment altruism forbids egoism, it tends 
to make the individual blind to the meaning of life. 
When one has been tempted, he is able to succor those 
who are tempted; and when one has for himself felt the 
meaning of life, he is able to appreciate the same life- 
feeling in others ; but, where a system of ethics forbids 
that the ego should taste life, the ego has no idea of 
what is in the cup that he offers to the alter-ego. In 
addition to this paradox of living for others when one 
has no idea of what life itself means, altruism is so 
unfortunate as to open up a way of escape for those 
who have neither the wit nor the courage to live their 
own lives ; for he who begins to entertain the sad pre- 
sentiment that he has no value in the world, conceals 
his embarrassment by covering his poor soul with altru- 
istic cloaks, as if to say, " I never intended to realize 
my own life." Better than such morbid altruism is the 
morbid egoism of the decadent school ; better than this 



39o 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



" social service " is the calm retreat into the maisonette 
of solipsistic selfhood. Nevertheless, individualism is 
still possessed of the belief that one can be himself, not 
within alone, but in the free of the limitless humanistic 
order, since objectivity in life does not necessarily imply 
enclosure. 

To be human without being social is by no means 
impossible for him who is willing to make ethical dis- 
tinctions ; and to be one's self while having due concern 
for the essential welfare of mankind is not a paradox 
for him who appreciates the meaning of humanity. 
Christianity keeps reminding the individual that his own 
soul has supreme worth while still persuading the indi- 
vidual that he should elaborate such a wide conception 
of selfhood as to include the genuine welfare of those 
who have like passions with himself. Buddhism, with 
its insistence upon self-salvation, has a morality of mercy 
which assumes responsibility for the welfare of, not 
only other human beings, but that of serpents and in- 
sects as well. Russian nihilism, which is inimical to all 
social institutions, entertains a most profound love of 
humanity; nowhere in the western world does one find 
either such destructiveness or such compassion. Such 
examples of life-philosophy lead one to put the pertinent 
question, Where, then, is humanity to be found, without 
or within? Sociality has its answer ready: humanity 
exists in exterior manner as an assemblage of persons 
and an arrangement of institutions. Individualism in- 
sists that humanity dwells within so that the greater the 
sense of genuine life the greater the sense of compassion. 

To be sympathetic, one must be himself : by means of 
philanthropy one may make use of his extra-individual- 
istic possessions to " help " humanity ; by means of 
social service, one may perhaps dedicate a crude form 
of impersonal activity; but to be of worth to man- 
kind involves something more sincere, more substantial. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 391 

Between practical altruism and essential sympathism 
there yawns a deep gulf ; altruism is limited by its 
optimism, sympathism has beneath and beyond it all the 
depths of human pessimism. According to optimistic 
altruism, it is the ethical business of the individual to 
improve the conditions under which the sons of men 
live and toil ; according to pessimistic sympathism, man 
is called upon to realize how hard it is to be human, 
how terrible are the conditions of spiritual life upon 
earth. In addition to a sincere appreciation of man's 
true condition, sympathism is possessed of the idea that, 
instead of laying the emphasis upon the exterior con- 
ditions of life as these loom up with all the absurdities 
of the industrial order, help can come only by means 
of enlightenment and beauty. In this spirit, the Idiot- 
Prince of Dostoievsky, after he had heard the nihilist 
say, " Railways have corrupted the springs of life," 
ventured the assertion that " beauty will save the 
world." * If art rather than industry is to save the 
world, one may thus assert that aesthetic personality, 
the living of one's own life, rather than industrial effi- 
ciency, is to be the means of human salvation. In the 
aesthetical, one can be himself indeed; so that individ- 
ualism can offer no complaint ; then, perhaps, beauty 
will save the world. 

II. THE ENJOYMENT OF EXISTENCE 

In the higher synthesis of the self and the world- 
whole, the first step to be taken involves the heart-felt 
but obscure question of the joy of life. In the eudae- 
monistic field, individualism is not without precedent, 
although one may hardly assume that the stupid sense 
of self-love characteristic of the Enlightenment or the 
morbid sense of self-culture famous in the nineteenth 
century provides a sufficient reason for the fine propo- 

1 The Idiot, tr. Garnett, Pt. Ill, Chs. IV-V. 



39^ 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



sition that existence is enjoyment. Self-love had its 
basis in the animalism of human nature; self-culture 
depended for its verity upon a kind of human emotion- 
alism; genuine self-realization through the joy of life 
must find its ground in something more fundamental 
and dignified. Since it is not the temporary enjoyment 
which comes from pleasure, nor the exceptional happi- 
ness due to aesthetic ecstasy, but a total and permanent 
experience of life-enjoyment upon which life rests, it 
becomes necessary for philosophy of life to discover the 
true dialectic of human happiness. Furthermore, upon 
this substantial sense of enjoyment depends the verity 
of self-knowledge, the true ground of one's own life; 
in the same manner, philosophy of life must provide for 
the aesthetic synthesis of the self and the world-whole, 
as this comes about through culture. Upon the sense 
of substantial enjoyment does the burden of life really 
rest, as the entablature upon a caryatid, whence it be- 
comes necessary to have the idea of enjoyment firm and 
worthy. Life might perhaps go on and attain to some 
sort of goal as that which is valuable and rational; but 
a complete life-philosophy must not fail to include the 
joy of life along with the conviction that life has worth 
and truth. 

i. Joy and Pleasure 

That there can be life apart from doing and thinking 
would seem to be impossible; that there can be genuine 
existence without enjoyment is a proposition equally 
groundless. Philosophy of life insists upon eudaemon- 
ism, not solely for the sake of the sense of happiness 
which such a philosophy implies, but because of the 
very sense of life which is conveyed by enjoyment as 
its vehicle. One fatality in all scientific and social 
thinking is found in the bland endeavor to view life as 
so much reaction upon the world, so much representation 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 393 

of the world's forms without any internal sense of the 
total meaning which life within and the world without 
should impart. In its psychology, scientism has per- 
sisted in looking upon the soul as a mere condition of 
indifferent consciousness without the inward apprecia- 
tion of the warm content of the soul-states involved; 
encouraged by this negation of the inner life, social 
thought has tried to explain the life of humanity in 
such a way as to prevent the self from the private 
enjoyment of its own soul-state. Without again resort- 
ing to the fine, the vicious, or the morbid, individualism 
must continue to indicate the return to the inner life, 
which it may do by emphasizing a substantial and worthy 
sense of enjoyment. 

It is indeed natural and plausible to look upon pleas- 
ure as the most important experience in life, because 
pleasure makes such an immediate appeal to conscious- 
ness. In the same manner, the sensation of sweetness, 
due to the excitation of gustatory cells at the tip of the 
tongue, seems to be pre-eminent among the gustatory 
sensations, if not among the others as well. But the 
sense of pleasure among the sons of men is disin- 
tegrating, whence the higher synthesis of human souls 
under the form of humanity would seem to be impos- 
sible hedonistically. In addition to this general objec- 
tion, there is at least one other, to the effect that the 
temporary experience of pleasure ever tends to forbid 
the development of selfhood within; to overcome this 
preliminary difficulty, individualism must resort to a 
critical examination of eudaemonism in order that it 
may observe where mere pleasure is wanting and how 
this lack may be relieved. In purely ethical thought, 
the tendency has been either to affirm pleasure as such 
or to negate it summarily ; where Epicureans say, " yes," 
Stoics say, "no." But, to deal justly with the feeling 
of pleasure, it is far wiser to analyze the felicific ex- 



394 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



perience, and then, having observed the shortcomings of 
the feeling, find some essential way of grounding it, in 
order that it may take its due place in philosophy of 
life. 

From the hedonistic point of view, the chief argument 
for pleasure lies in the fact that pleasure is ever present 
in the consciousness of the individual. As the invari- 
able accompaniment of life, pleasure co-exists with con- 
sciousness, as either a desire for enjoyment or an aver- 
sion to pain; yet, how much argument may be found 
in the obvious fact that man as man is called upon to 
live in connection with his feelings? Breathing and 
eating are likewise invariable accompaniments of life, 
and yet ethics is not disposed to make life purely respir- 
atory or gastronomic. Since man has lungs, digestive 
organs, and arteries, it is to be expected that breathing, 
eating, and feeling should suggest something in con- 
nection with his life; but mere suggestion is far from 
being convincing. In the special case of feeling, psy- 
chology does not fail to recognize that the experience 
of pleasure is something momentary, isolated, and com- 
plete; the self has the feeling now, but that is all there 
is to the experience. It is true that such feelings have 
been had before, and will be experienced again ; but the 
feeling of the moment is of the present alone, having 
no memorial connection with the past or anticipatory 
relation to the future. Now to attempt the alignment 
of a life-ideal upon the basis of such isolated pleasures 
would be to attempt to draw a flowing line by means of 
fixed points. In the realization of pleasure's limits, 
scientific hedonism removed the feeling from its central 
position in consciousness and made it but the symptom 
of organic well-being. 

In the complete philosophy of hedonism, it is a sig- 
nificant fact that the experience of pleasure has played 
no essential part; if Epicurus was the prophet of pleas- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 395 

ure in particular, it was Aristotle who upheld happiness 
in general. When, therefore, the issue became one of 
permanent enjoyment instead of temporary felicity, sense 
gave way to will and intellect, whence the question re- 
solved itself into an issue between voluntarists and intel- 
lectualists, who argued here for the will as the spring 
of life-joy, there for the intellect as the source of human 
happiness. As a philosophy of eudaemonism, the vol- 
untaristic and intellectualistic have their due places, and 
they must contend between themselves for the honor of 
providing joy for the human soul. At the same time, 
the philosophy of eudaemonism, maintained by Voltaire 
and Goethe, by Turgenieff and Flaubert, all of whom 
upheld the will as the source of happiness, has the good 
effect of neutralizing that dogmatic hedonism which has 
ever made impossible the genuine appreciation of human 
feeling. But, when eudaemonism asserts that happiness, 
instead of being found in feeling, consists either in doing 
or thinking, individualism in its quest of the joy of life 
is not so ready to abandon feeling, which must contain 
some sense of life's meaning. The question then arises, 
if mere hedonism is unable to express the meaning of 
human happiness, is there not another way of placing 
feeling upon its proper basis whence it may become the 
ground of the joy of life? The answer to this question 
is to be found in the aesthetical. Now it was in the 
pursuit of the aesthetical rather than of the hedonistic 
that individualism sought to emancipate the self from 
the outer world. 

Before the aesthetical element in human feeling may 
be submitted to any technical analysis of its forms, it 
is expedient to consider just wherein the living content 
of such aesthesia consists. This is not to be found in 
the hedonic, which might have been dismissed with even 
less attention than has just been devoted to it. Like the 
poor, the feelings of pleasure and pain will ever be with 



396 THE GROUND AND GOAD OF HUMAN LIFE 

us, yet their mere persistence is no ground for our 
regarding them as the ground of human existence. With 
a shallow psychology of life according to which pleasure 
and pain were made the foci of human existence, hedon- 
ism made its cause still more dubious by passing over 
directly into the ethical. Even with a crippled psy- 
chology, hedonism might have made a show of plausi- 
bility if, instead of indulging the dream that it was 
solving the moral problem as such, it had made no more 
of its scheme than a general philosophy of life, or per- 
haps an aesthetics like that of Burke. In its desire to 
secure a predicate for the subject, " virtue," hedonism 
promptly decided upon pleasure, whence it elaborated 
the rough and ready ethical judgment, " Virtue is pleas- 
ure." In most instances, the hedonist was anxious to 
escape from the egoistic corollary implied by such an 
unhappy synthesis, so that the history of hedonism is 
punctuated with the ideals of benevolence, sympathy, 
and social sentiment ; nevertheless, this attempt at ethical 
largesse indicated no departure from the primary prin- 
ciples of immediate feeling, since it was always the 
pleasure of somebody which was involved in the hedonic 
ideal. With its strange compunctions, the hedonist in- 
sisted that it was right for one to promote pleasure so 
long as that pleasure was not his own. Between the 
approved pleasure of the alter-ego and the disapproved 
pleasure of the ego himself, the sense of life fell between 
two stools. 

If the redemption of hedonism is not to be found in 
altruism, it is a question whether it was brought about 
by nineteenth-century individualism when the latter 
sought so to refine the feeling that it might appear 
worthy of being entertained by the ego. No longer was 
ft the crass pleasure of sensational experience with all 
its temporary gratification, but the inner consciousness 
of feeling as that which is aesthetically fine. Where 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 397 

Romanticism made this feeling exquisite and frappant, 
Decadence colored it with the melancholy and morbid, 
while Symbolism has advanced it to the innermost realm 
of nervous aesthesia. There is perhaps more hope for 
the ethical success of feeling when, instead of being 
looked upon as so much raw hedonia, it is appreciated 
with all the refinements of aesthesia, so that one may 
give ear to Schlegel and Baudelaire where he cannot 
assent to the hedonism of Burke and Pope. At the 
same time, it cannot be doubted that the fortunes of 
individualism were more secure with Romanticism than 
they had been with the more classic and realistic thinker. 
By means of aesthesia, the inward sense of life was 
delivered from the domination of an absurd naturalism, 
while the retreat to the inner life served to save the 
self-conscious individual from the ready synthesis of all 
souls under the generalization of " society." Benthams, 
Mills, and Spencers might mesh themselves with their 
social philosophy, but Blakes, Stirners, and Ibsens were 
not to be caught so easily. The lime on the branch 
caught no prey, because the bird did not alight. 

The problem which now confronts the individualist, 
who must believe that social hedonism is an overcome 
standpoint, is whether individualistic aesthesia is suffi- 
cient to explain the meaning and satisfy the demands of 
the ego's inner life. The service of aestheticism in 
evincing the independent form of the self in its soul- 
states and in endowing the self with due content, cannot 
be set aside by any staid criticism of aestheticism as 
decadence; at the same time, the incompleteness of 
aestheticism is well known to the sincere individualist. 
The meaning of aesthetic individualism appears at once 
when one compares the older hedonic method with the 
more advanced doctrine of aesthesia; where hedonism 
sought to provide happiness as the enjoyment of ex- 
terior things as objects of pleasure, aestheticism made 



398 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN UFE 

the attempt to construe happiness as the enjoyment of 
soul-states as subjects of beauty. Taken by itself, 
aestheticism might appear as so much hysteria which 
could only end in illusion; but, when it is appreciated 
that hedonism never penetrates to the inner self of 
either the ego or the alter-ego, the relative worth of the 
aesthetic method cannot be questioned, since it was by 
means of aesthesia that the individual came into the 
consciousness of his interior humanity. To seek hap- 
piness in things and to seek the promotion of universal 
happiness in the same exteriorizing manner is fatal to 
all humanism ; for neither egoism nor altruism has the 
power to elicit the genuine springs of humanity within 
man. To seek happiness in soul-states apart from any 
real rapport with the external order, is more noble and 
more promising; but the lack of objectivity is fatal to 
the hopes of the aesthete who would come to an under- 
standing with himself. At the same time, the subject- 
ivism of Blake and Nietzsche seems more hopeful than 
the objectivism of Bentham and Spencer. 

The joy of life comes into being when the individual 
with his own soul-states comes into intelligible relations 
with the world of exterior things and persons. Apart 
from any dialectic of subject and object, of thought and 
thing, philosophy of life comes to the conclusion that 
the adjustment of the inner life to the outer world of 
nature and humanity is the one thing needful for the 
joy of life as such. Ethics has its way of relating the 
will to the world through conduct ; metaphysics is equally 
adept in passing from reason to reality; aestheticism 
should be equally effectual in providing for a means of 
transition from the inner life of feeling to the outer 
world of beauty. It cannot be denied that individual- 
ism in the form of aestheticism has been subjectivism, 
even where it must be admitted that such subjectivism 
has been a willed subjectivism which has never feared 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 399 

lest it might end in solipsism. Indeed, to be as nearly 
solipsistic as possible, to ignore the exteriority of things 
and persons, has been the open aim rather than the un- 
happy conclusion of the individualistic doctrine. Where 
the egoism of the Enlightenment in both its meta- 
physical and moralistic forms, began to doubt the valid- 
ity of its doctrine of selfhood the moment that solipsism 
appeared, the individualism of the nineteenth century 
looked upon the appearance of solipsism as the signal 
for genuine effort on the part of the would-be self-willed 
ego. If egoism feared that solipsism might render void 
the things of the world, individualism hoped for that 
very consummation whereby the self might breathe 
freely in a world without things or persons. Schlegel 
thus gloried in his Ironie; Stirner placed his affair upon 
nothing; Baudelaire sought nothing but the moi-meme; 
Ibsen and Nietzsche disavowed all duty except that 
which is devoted to the self. Hence, it was not self- 
hood in spite of solipsism, but selfhood by means of 
solipsism which was upheld by the egoists of the nine- 
teenth century; in the midst of their strivings, these ego- 
ists were wise enough to realize that, in the eternal con- 
flict between inner and outer, it is always the outer 
which prevails, whence it is absurd to fear lest one's 
sense of selfhood or one's will-to-selfhood will have the 
effect of actually making null the heavy, organized world 
of scientism and sociality. In the face of a predomi- 
nant objectivism, the individualist has asserted all the 
subjectivism which lay in his power. 

Not by the enjoyment of things which tend to mask 
the meaning of soul-states, not by the enjoyment of 
inward states which render one oblivious of things, but 
by the enjoyment of such states of consciousness as may 
relate themselves to the things of the world does happi- 
ness come to the individual. To cook the hare, one 
must first catch it ; to enjoy the world in which the self 



4 oo THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

appears, one must first come into possession of the self. 
Let it be granted that individualism has been subjective 
and mystical, and that, in the midst of his individualism 
of inner states, free initiatives, and spontaneous ideals, 
he has not found it in his power or according to his 
pleasure to relate himself to either nature or humanity : 
it is still possible for the lyrical subject with his fineness 
of emotion to relate his being to the epic order of things 
and persons with all their stolidity. From this relation 
between inner and outer, a genuine inner and a worthy 
outer, the joy of life must come. Individualism has 
shunned the world, because the world has insisted upon 
the objective recognition of things apart from the inner 
meaning which these may have for the self ; but, in so 
doing, individualism has pursued its quasi-solipsistic way 
under the unhappy impression that nature was nothing 
but scientism, humanity only so much crude sociality. 
In such scientized nature with its insistence upon fact 
as fact, in such socialized humanity with its interpre- 
tation of worth as mere utility, there was indeed no 
place for the individual with his intensified and idealized 
inner life; but nature is more extensive than scientism, 
humanity more intensive than sociality, whence the indi- 
vidual may issue forth from his provisional solipsism 
toward the objective order of full nature and free hu- 
manity. For purposes of system, it may have been 
necessary to render the world scientific and social, but 
the organization of exteriority according to positivism 
must not be taken as the final word; if positivism, with 
its immediate synthesis of the obvious was ever true, it 
is not true to the conditions of contemporary life and 
thought, so that the time is ripe for the higher synthesis 
of the naturalistic and humanistic. 

2. The; Aesthetic Nature of Enjoyment 

Enjoyment, then, is neither the appreciation of things 
nor the indulgence of soul-states. In the paradoxical 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 401 

condition of human feeling, there has always appeared 
this contradiction: where hedonism seemed to provide 
pleasure by means of things objective, the result was 
purely subjective and selfish ; where aestheticism at- 
tempted to find its joy through states subjective, aes- 
theticism always had about it an air of trans-individual- 
istic mysticism in accordance with which it overcame 
its own subjectivism, and elaborated some sort of ex- 
terior existence. The more objective hedonism tried to 
be, the more subjective it became; the more subjective 
aestheticism sought to be, the more objective was the 
result. The true aim of individualism is to remove from 
personal feeling that element of immediate interest which 
prevents the feeling from becoming a topic of universal 
meaning and permanent satisfaction. Now, to expand 
the inner soul-state until it shall take on the proportions 
of exterior existence may seem to be a hopeless task, if 
not a psychological contradiction ; yet individualism was 
never far from such a kingdom, while aesthetics has 
long been in full possession of it. From the aesthetic 
point of view, it is possible to take a simple feeling of 
pleasure and relate it to the whole of man's life within 
and the totality of the world without ; if this were not the 
case, and man was forced to enjoy pleasure in its merely 
temporary feltness, there could be no science of aes- 
thetics. The individual who adopts the aesthetic atti- 
tude takes the world-whole of things and persons into 
his own mind, which becomes more than ever internal 
and yet more than ever universal, while outer things and 
inner states become unified in a superior form of per- 
ception. 

The aesthetic joy of life makes possible the conserva- 
tion of life's value within and the correspondence of that 
inner life with the exterior world, as this is found in 
both nature and humanity. If there is to be a higher 
synthesis, in the light of which the self shall reunite its 



402 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

self with nature and humanity, it is possible that such 
a synthesis may be perfected by means of the aesthetic 
consciousness ; but, before this can be done, the depth 
of that consciousness must be sounded, lest our philos- 
ophy repose too confidently in that which may be more 
fine than substantial. To build up interior life upon the 
basis of pleasure was a task which hedonism attempted 
with ill success; nor was its solution of the life-problem 
made more convincing when hedonism took the pleas- 
ure from the ego and transferred it to the alter-ego. 
Aesthetic philosophy makes use of no such altruistic 
makeshift, since it believes that what is unworthy 
with one is equally unworthy with the other. Aesthetic 
thought seeks to overcome the difficulty between egoism 
and altruism by calling attention to those values which 
are so large and superior that they cannot be appropri- 
ated by the individual alone, while they are so integral 
that they cannot be divided into lots to be shared by 
isolated egos. Aestheticism distinguishes joy from pleas- 
ure by making that joy profoundly internal, while it 
saves joy from threat of selfishness by relegating it to 
the remote. Now pleasure is superficial in the indi- 
vidual's life just as it is immediate in his world; whence 
arise all the dilemmas of egoism and altruism. Aesthetic 
thought fights fire with fire; beauty displaces merely 
temporary enjoyment, while the full satisfaction of the 
individual's life removes him from all pettiness. 

Where the technical principles of aesthetics may serve 
for the interpretation of the fine arts, they do not always 
make possible an aesthetic philosophy of life, still less 
the aesthetic synthesis of man with his humanity. Yet 
one need do no more than expand the academic ideals 
of beauty to lay down the principles of a philosophy of 
life, as Schiller derived the ideal of aesthetic education 
of mankind from the scientific aesthetics of Kant. Art 
is not life, nor is either ethics or philosophy; yet life 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 403 

may make use of these cultural disciplines for the pur- 
pose of discovering its own ground and goal. Where 
life makes use of the aesthetical, it seizes upon the fac- 
tors of disinterestedness and remoteness as these appear 
in the artist consciousness ; these life uses for the pur- 
pose of placing the individual and the world in such 
positions that they may come to mutual understanding. 
By means of the disinterested, the self is led to find joy 
in that which does not concern his private satisfactions 
in life; whence the more subjective the self becomes, 
the more objective are its soul-states. By means of the 
remote, the things of the world are made to concern 
themselves with the real advantages which they are 
calculated to impart, rather than with the immediate 
satisfactions which lie upon their surface. Then, when 
the intensified soul lays hold of the remote objects of 
the world, the dualism between the self and the world 
is at once forgotten. That which is essential in man is 
en rapport with that which is fundamental in the world ; 
so that, instead of having the private ego making use of 
the manifold of phenomenal objects, philosophy of life 
is dealing with the major self in its relation to the world. 
Plato contemplating the world of ideas, Dante viewing 
the spectacle of the universe, and Goethe laying hold of 
nature, are examples of the aesthetic consciousness in 
operation. Where the purely aesthetical falls short of 
this life-ideal appears, first of all, in the emphasis which 
aesthetics lays upon pleasure. 

The desire to view beauty as mere pleasure fails to 
free the mind from the idea of interest which seems so 
fatal to all aestheticism ; further, if the mind is aes- 
thetically disinterested, what matters it whether the 
feeling under contemplation is one of pleasure or of 
pain? "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," because 
it is based upon pleasure without interest. Yet, in such 
a conception of the aesthetic, it is the permanent rather 



26 



404 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



than the pleasurable that lends itself most readily to the 
idea of beauty. With the Decadence, it was the element 
of sorrow, not that of joy, which was supposed to con- 
stitute the idea of beauty. It was in this connection that 
Poe made Decadence possible when he said, " Regard- 
ing, then, beauty as my province, my next question 
referred to the tone of its highest manifestation, and 
all experience has shown that this tone is one of sad- 
ness .... Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of 
all the poetic tones." 2 Baudelaire made sadness imper- 
ative when he said, Sois belle et sois triste! If it still 
be insisted that pure beauty concerns itself with ideal 
pleasure, it will be difficult to account for more than a 
part of the fine arts, where the idealization of feeling 
has been quite indifferent to the idea of pleasure as such. 
All drama would have to be comedy; all sublimity and 
pathos would have to be excluded. The idea of pleasure 
may carry the aesthetical a part of the way, but to com- 
plete the journey to the Gate Beautiful something more 
substantial becomes necessary. While this problem is 
held in abeyance, the question which accompanies it 
must be taken up for consideration. 

The second problem concerns the passivistic ideal in- 
volved in the doctrine of pleasure minus interest. This 
conception of the beautiful involves the idea that, when 
interest is removed from the mind, the will is so neutral- 
ized that the mind loses its spontaneous sense of activity. 
While such a passivism might be recommended in con- 
nection with ethics and religion, and while certain phases 
of the beautiful may be said to possess it, the most sig- 
nificant factor in the sense of beauty consists in the 
ability to arouse powers which otherwise might lag or 
slumber. Thus it is more in the spirit of truth than of 
jest when we speak of pleasure minus interest, not as 
aesthetic, but as anaesthetic. Again, however unhappy 

2 Philosophy of Composition, in loc. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 405 

the suggestion, where formal aesthetics seems to regard 
art as anti-aphrodi 'ac, real art is more likely to act in 
the aphrodisiac manner. Those fine arts which are 
essentially static may perhaps have the cooling effect 
upon the mind, but such temporalistic arts as poetry, 
music, and dancing cannot be said to render the mind 
passive. Even with architecture, sculpture, and paint- 
ing, the quieting of ordinary feelings may be followed 
by the evoking of unusual ones. In this manner, the 
idea of passivity seems to suffer the fate of its com- 
panion notion of pleasure, since beauty and art are so 
often painful and dynamic in their character. 

In spite of this criticism directed toward the formal 
ideas of pleasure and passivity, it cannot be said that 
the essence of the aesthetical is conveyed by means of 
these imperfect notions. When the idea of disinterest- 
edness is applied to pleasure, it appears that it is not so 
much pleasure itself that aesthetics insists upon; rather 
is it the exceptional conscious state, which is so inde- 
pendent of interest that it may be either pleasurable or 
painful. The art of the Decadence sought its satisfac- 
tion in the morbid in which pleasure and pain were 
curiously blended. The explanation of this aesthetic 
situation is to be found in the idea of the disinterested 
feeling; that is, a feeling which was not identified with 
the average life of man. For this purpose, the painful 
was as good as the pleasurable. Thus, it is not dis- 
interested pleasure so much as it is disinterested feeling 
which lies at the heart of the aesthetic ideal, while the 
idea of disinterestedness seems to signify the detached 
condition of the self when it is under the spell of the 
beautiful. As a result of this criticism of the usual 
doctrine of the beautiful, the ideal of disinterested pleas- 
ure is changed to that of detached feeling. 

When the idea of disinterestedness is applied to the 
other question of aesthetics, the notion of passivity re- 



4 o6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ceives appropriate modification. The process of taking 
interest out of pleasure does not consist in merely making 
pleasure a Less ; it may as fitly become a More. In 
either case, ordinary life-feeling with its organic con- 
nections is set aside in favor of a sentiment which, in 
one case, bears the stamp of the ethical, where in the 
other it is more thoroughly artistic. In either case, the 
aesthetic feeling signalizes a departure from ordinary 
experience, since the aesthetic feeling is either a subdued 
decline from or an excited elevation above the ordinary. 
Where the natural and social order tend to produce and 
promote average feeling calculated to make the indi- 
vidual either healthy or useful, aesthetic feeling aban- 
dons the ordinary feeling for the sake of internalizing 
it. Thus, the leading idea of aesthetic feeling, while it 
is suggested by the ideal of disinterestedness, is more 
completely and worthily expressed by means of the idea 
of elevation. If in the midst of the aesthetical, there 
be no philosophy of life, there can appear to be little 
reason why the soul should thus be elevated; the result 
will be the decadence of art for art's sake : the poetic 
principle will produce the " poem which is a poem and 
nothing more, the poem written for the poem's sake," 
as Poe expressed it. 3 Individualism, however, so postu- 
lates the reunion of the self with the world that it can 
but regard aesthetic elevation as a means of attaining 
this height. 

The essential meaning and worth of the aesthetical as 
a means of establishing the joy of life will appear more 
clearly when the aesthetical with its boundless freedom 
is compared with the moral, wherein the will is ever 
under a certain sense of restraint. Be the ethical theory 
naturistic or characteristic, let it aim at desire or duty, 
the sense of obligation is such that it lays upon the will 
an imperative, whether hypothetical or categorical, inas- 

3 Poetic Principle, in loc. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 407 

much as the pursuit of either desire or duty involves a 
definite degree of ethical concentration and moral earn- 
estness. To assert the things of sense after the manner 
of the desiderative or to reject them in connection with 
duty, involves the will in the work of attention or inhi- 
bition. Now, the aesthetic consciousness so involves the 
whole self with the totality of the world that the self 
relieves the will of responsibility by refraining from both 
yea and nay. The aesthetic consciousness simply plays 
with the object of sense, neither pole of which, negative 
or positive, has attractions for it. Where ethical con- 
sciousness is necessarily wrapped up in interest, be that 
realistic or idealistic, the aesthetic consciousness eman- 
cipates itself by merely hovering over the object, which 
is neither sought nor shunned. To have the satisfaction 
of desire may be at the expense of duty; to have the 
satisfaction of duty may be at the expense of desire; 
but to have aesthetic satisfaction is to exercise the soul 
in its integrity apart from the painful dualism which 
morality so often engenders. Where the aesthetical 
transcends the dualism of desire and duty, it allows the 
soul to repose in its totality; and from this sense of 
totality within arises the idea that there is none the less 
reality without. In these two allied principles is involved 
the very joy of life. Stated in general terms, human 
happiness arises when the inner life is adjusted to ex- 
terior existence. Now this adjustment cannot come 
about when philosophy attempts to relate some isolated 
function of the self, like the will, to some special phase 
of the world, like that of energy. But, when the com- 
plete soul is one with the whole world, man is happy. 

The functions of doing and the forms of thinking can 
undoubtedly supply the soul with satisfaction; but the 
validity of work and culture as principles of happiness 
depends upon the acceptance of feeling as their proper 
terminus a quo. Where the aesthetical element is ig- 



4 o8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMaN LIFE 

nored, the sense of happiness, as this comes from either 
action or thought, is bound to be hurriedly conceived 
and scantily furnished with content. Earlier individual- 
ism took its stand upon eudaemonism because eudae- 
monism seemed to promise the reality of the inward 
soul-state as such; the error of such individualism has 
been found to consist in the aestheticism which so 
relished the soul-state that the mind became morbid. 
Nevertheless, there are possibilities of eudaemonistic 
existence in the internal state of the soul, and these 
possibilities are to be realized in such a way as individ- 
ualism may think proper and sufficient. Individualistic 
eudaemonism can neither repose in the immediate soul- 
state nor make hurried departure from it toward the 
kingdoms of doing and thinking; individualism must 
either tarry in the internal soul-state until that state has 
been realized to the full, or lay upon it the light but 
permanent touch of the aesthetic consciousness. Indeed, 
that which seems difficult for the hedonist, who would 
repose in the inward sense of pleasure, that which again 
seems unworthy to the rigorist who would find the 
genuine joy of life in the sterner affairs of work and 
conquest, becomes reasonably simple to the aesthete 
who would merely touch pleasure with that skill and 
lightness which is possible to him who has a consistent 
sense of the joy of life. Furthermore, it is more becom- 
ing for the apostle of will to set about in the elaboration 
of the ideal of worth, just as it were well for the intel- 
lectualist to busy himself with the difficult problem of 
the truth of life; in the midst of these more serious con- 
cerns, it is fitting that the aesthetic eudaemonist should 
be allowed the field of feeling in which he may have 
the opportunity to evoke the life-ideal of happiness. 

The philosophical possibilities of the joy of living 
appear still further when the subjective and objective 
relations of existence are considered. In its haste to 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 409 

complete its philosophy, the mind has usually concluded 
that life consists either in taking from the exterior world 
or in giving to it. Where the philosophy has been of 
an empirical character, it has laid its emphasis upon the 
receptive form of spiritual life. In the case of knowl- 
edge, it has been assumed that mind is of such a nature 
as to be convinced by the external impression that truth 
was of an outer nature ; in the case of ethics, it has been 
the same external order which has been supposed to 
content the mind through the experience of pleasure. 
On the other hand, where the character of the philo- 
sophic has been idealistic, the mind has sought to im- 
press its innate forms upon the world, while the moral 
will has been equally earnest in working from within 
outward toward the exterior order. Those who have 
opposed the empirical method of thinking and doing 
have sought to point out that receptivity without reac- 
tion is not sufficient to account for the ideas of truth 
and goodness, just as these critics have indicated that 
such a realistic conception of the problem failed to 
account for the strange adaptability of the inner intellect 
and will to the outer impression and incentive. When 
such idealistic thinkers have set up their view, their 
realistic critics have not failed to suggest that idealism 
too was not without its shortcomings. If philosophy 
ignores the nature of the exterior world, how can it 
account for the adaptability of that world to the inward 
ideas and motives of the interior mind? It is not the 
office of aestheticism to seek a settlement of this tradi- 
tional dispute, since aestheticism is content to suggest 
that before the object is sundered from the subject, or 
the subject from the object, it is well to realize the 
possibilities of immediacy as these appear in the aesthetic 
conception of man and the world. In this immediate 
unity of subject and object, the sense of existence does 
not fail to appear, and it is this original sense or joy 



4 io THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of existence which may ultimately be of service in 
solving the problems of thinking and doing. 

From the aesthetic standpoint of immediate existence 
in the world, it is the duty of philosophy of life to insist 
upon the fact of existence as such. It is quite likely 
that, from this intuitive sense of existence, philosophy 
may be able to deduce the more advanced ideas of worth 
and truth, but these tend to invalidate themselves where 
their original point of departure is forgotten or ignored. 
Primarily, life is neither a receiving nor a giving, but 
an existing; the self may react or may reflect upon the 
world, but it must first realize the world. From the 
aesthetic viewpoint, the first task of the self is to exist 
and absorb its experience. If, after that, subject and 
object must separate, and the claims of each be meas- 
ured, no harm can come to either intellect or will, which 
have had in the immediate sense of existence the prepa- 
ration needed for their work in the world. The earlier 
individualism of Decadence was so impressed with the 
importance of the soul-state and the joy of existence 
that it could not conceal its antipathy to the sense of 
worth and truth which had ever tended to render null 
the immediate sense of existence; the newer individual- 
ism, not less interested in the free soul-state or the 
inviolate joy of life, is inclined to regard the aesthetic 
sense of inwardness as something preparatory to the 
sterner issues of worth and truth. The joy of life is 
thus the beginning, but not the end of a complete phi- 
losophy of life. 

3. Enjoyment as Vision 

The existence of life as such, apart from the sense 
of worth and truth which this life may finally be found 
to possess, involves the idea that, at the outset, philos- 
ophy consists of free, intellectual vision. The very fact 
that the self can say, " I am," contains in it a sense of 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 411 

truth independent of the reaction of the practical will 
and the reflection of the speculative intellect. The ex- 
ercise of free vision would thus seem to obtain in advance 
of the deductions which are drawn from the mind and 
the inductions which are based upon the observation of 
nature's behavior : indeed, if the mind has not been pre- 
viously prepared by the inherent sense of existence, it 
is difficult to see how the understanding can make intel- 
ligible use of its logical powers, or how the facts of 
experience can find their proper place in the mind. The 
character of the mind which, prior to induction and 
deduction, exercises free, intellectual vision, is neither 
a tabula rasa nor a completely organized understanding; 
it is rather the character of intellectus ipse; it is intel- 
lectual life. 

The need of philosophy is the need of appreciating the 
immediacy of intellectual life independent of both inner 
forms and outer facts. Mediaevalism went from form 
to form until, by living on its own tissue, the mind 
became emaciated ; modernism has gone from fact to 
fact, until it has become burdened by the concrete. In 
connection with modern thought especially, the need of 
intellectual vision becomes more and more apparent, 
since the passion for predicating, for attributing to sub- 
jects a vast array of adjectival qualities, has so bur- 
dened the substantial that it can no longer bear the 
burden. The chief subjects of all philosophy are found 
in the ideas of " world " and " mind." Under the influ- 
ence of synthetic thinking, such a subject as the world 
has undergone indefinite predication until, with the vast 
array of qualitative attributes, the original sense of the 
world as a complete, unified substance is all but wholly 
lost to view. The same may be observed in the realm 
of the psychological; here, the original sense of mind as 
such has succumbed to the excessive predication due to 
psychological investigation. The attributes have sub- 



4 i2 THE GROUND AND GOAE OF HUMAN LIFE 

merged the substance; the qualities have overcome the 
thing. 

Where the deductive, rationalistic method of thought 
has sought to check this excessive synthetic tendency, 
it has been able to do little more than indicate the par- 
ticular method according to which realistic thinking has 
been able to accumulate its data. Rationalistic thought 
has thus failed to lead the mind back to its original 
unity; for, where rationalistic thought has been able 
to proceed with a limited number of principles, real- 
istic thought has demanded an unlimited number of 
facts. In both rationalism and realism, the pluralistic 
holds sway. The remedy for such an unhappy con- 
dition of things, where the whole seems less than the 
part, is to be found in the native sense of unity inherent 
in the intellect as a life, a life which shows itself capable 
of free vision. It might seem that such intellectual 
vision, based as it is upon the idea of existence as such, 
were none other than the ancient Parmenidean principle, 
" Being is being, Being is thinking." Yet free intellect- 
ualism, while it must insist that existence as such con- 
tains a certain amount of insight apart from calculation, 
cannot repose in the purely static and rationalistic ideal 
of the ancient thinker. The philosophy of free vision 
does indeed rest upon the idea of sheer existence as the 
prerequisite for all doing and thinking, just as it further 
emphasizes the importance of immediate knowing apart 
from reasoning and calculating; but such free vision 
bases itself upon the immediate sense of life, whence 
the ego is able to say, in a manner the converse of that 
of Descartes and Augustine, " I am, therefore I know — 
sum, ergo scio." 

To this method of intellectual vision based upon the 
existence of the self as self, it will be objected that it 
closes the door of knowledge the moment it is opened, 
as if it were to settle all problems of existence by say- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 413 

ing, " Being is being," and answer all questions concern- 
ing knowledge by asserting, " Thinking is thinking." 
But such is far from the purpose or end of aesthetic 
intellectualism. Such a free aestheticism closes no door, 
because it has opened none; and it has opened none, 
because it has seen none to open; the vision of aesthetic 
intellectualism has ever been a vision in the free. That 
which is difficult for logic with its idea of truth, that 
which is difficult for ethics with its idea of worth, has 
not the same difficulty for aesthetics with its idea of 
beauty. This sense of beauty is found in immediate 
existence in the experience of which comes the joy of 
life. To depart from this original intuition, in order 
that here the object and there the subject may be per- 
fected in detail, is quite natural, quite necessary; yet, 
this departure need not cause the mind to forget that 
there is in the midst of its doing and thinking a unity 
of life and existence. 

Idealism hesitates to yield to the objective order lest 
the independence of thought be lost to it; idealism thus 
insists upon the absolute in the form of either a first 
principle or a necessary ground. To this attempt to 
fixate all knowledge, realism responds by pointing out 
that, when the first principle is premised as point of 
departure, it becomes necessary to assume a beginning 
of such beginning, whence appears a series of absolutes 
corresponding to the series of relatives from which ideal- 
ism sought to deliver thought ; in the same manner, real- 
ism contends that, when a ground for the relative has 
been found, a further ground for that absolute must also 
be found. In this manner, thought is ever called upon 
to premise an origin of origins, a ground of grounds. 
It is well known that Kant appealed to the ethical to 
save him from such a contradiction, and that Schelling 
made use of the Kantian aesthetic to effect his own 
deliverance from the antinomy involved in the conflict- 



4 i4 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LJFE 

ing claims of idealism and realism. The philosophy of 
life seeks to avoid this contradiction by observing that 
life as life enjoys the immediate unity of subject and 
object, of absolute and relative, a unity in which the 
beauty of the world and the joy of life are immediately 
found. From such unified intuition of life, philosophy 
proceeds to make its academic distinctions from which 
result the formal notions of worth and truth ; were there 
no such unity, the distinction between subject and object, 
absolute and relative would have no meaning. Where 
Transcendentalism sought to reunite the halves of the 
immediate unity, aestheticism shows no disposition to 
divide unified life into its possible pairs of opposites. 

The enjoyment and exercise of free, intellectual vision 
based upon the immediate unity of mind with the world 
does not fail to have effect upon the secondary methods 
of philosophy of life as these have to do with action 
and thought ; that is, with reaction upon the world and 
reflection upon the ideas which the world conveys to 
the mind. When philosophy is considered as a form of 
intellectual life in which free vision is predominant, the 
usual dualisms of thought and thing, of practical and 
speculative are unnecessary and misleading. Individ- 
ualistic philosophy of life premises an " I am " before 
it seems to conclude, " I will," and " I think " ; such 
individualism does not merely work toward or look 
forward to existence, rather does it begin by enjoying 
existence. The reason why the self, which enjoys the 
immediate existence of the world, is led to seek beyond 
the joy of life the worth and truth of life, is found in 
the fact that the self seeks in the ideas of worth and 
truth acceptable forms of self-expression. The self, 
which begins by enjoying life as such, is led to seek 
after a world of work and a world of knowledge, a 
world-order in which it may come to its own. Only 
as the immediate, aesthetic unity of the self with the 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 415 

world is premised is it possible to elaborate a consistent 
view of either work or knowledge. 

The validity of such an immediate unity of the mind 
with the world cannot be doubted by him who is aware 
and appreciative of the aesthetic ideal as that which is 
constituted by the universal and necessary without the 
generalization and abstraction of the logical concept. 
Kant, who made aesthetic thinking possible, should have 
placed the aesthetic at the beginning instead of at the 
end of his critical system ; should have regarded it as the 
original, not as the acquired, unity of sense and under- 
standing, of practical and speculative. When aesthetic 
truth is understood as that which contains the original 
unity of mind as existence, it becomes possible to con- 
ceive of the aesthetic idea as something natural, rather 
than as something extraordinary. The aesthetic idea 
contains the universal and necessary, but not in the 
general and abstract manner of logic. This idea is to 
be explained in the light of the fact that it was from 
the immediate necessity and universality of the idea that 
logic proceeded when it went on to analyze the neces- 
sary in the form of the abstract, the universal in the 
form of the general. Had not the universal and neces- 
sary already existed in the aesthetic idea, the derivation 
of them by logic would have been impossible. Now, it 
is the originally necessary and universal which afford 
the basis of the mind's existence, just as it is upon these 
grounds that the joy of existence becomes possible. 
The immediate sense and enjoyment of existence is then 
completely distinguished from the derivative ideas of 
worth and truth, inasmuch as one phase of beauty 
makes no distinctions of interest, while the other ignores 
the distinction of particular and general. In the original 
intuition of the aesthetic mind, it is free vision and 
enjoyment in which as yet no suggestion of interest and 
the concept have appeared. 



4 i6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

III. THE AESTHETIC SYNTHESIS 

The misunderstanding that has arisen between the 
inner self and the outer world has been due to the fact 
that individualism has ever entertained too limited a 
conception of selfhood, while scientism has indulged in 
a conception of nature too prosaic to permit one to 
regard the world as the place of the human soul. In 
the same manner, the ethical discussion of the question 
of life in the world has proceeded to oppose the selfish 
ego to the practical order of sociality. Where Descartes 
defined selfhood in such a manner as to render impos- 
sible any sort of metaphysical commerce with the ex- 
terior world, Hobbes described the human self in a way 
which at once forbade any genuine relationship between 
the individual and society. When genuine individual- 
ism arose in the nineteenth century, the conception of 
the ego as the will-to-selfhood and the notion of nature 
as a system of blind striving served only to make a bad 
matter worse. Man and the world, so it seemed, had 
had a serious falling out. On the humanistic side, the 
situation was no better, since the ego of self-culture was 
far from having a place in the socialized order. Where 
self-consciousness opposed itself to the static arrange- 
ment of the world, self-will set itself at variance with 
the world viewed dynamically, so that man and his world 
were at sword's points. Where self-love tended to negate 
the political arrangement of humanity, self-culture was 
out of tune with humanity as social; whence man could 
find his humanity only as he retreated to his inner life. 
Solipsism and egoism, irrationalism and immoralism, 
were the forms in which the independence of the self 
expressed itself. Now scientism and sociality wish the 
individual to be something less than these; but individ- 
ualism believes that the hope of establishing a new 
synthesis of the self and the world depends upon the 
individual's becoming something more. 



JOY OF UFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 417 

1. The Aesthetic Synthesis with Nature 

In order to calculate how the better self of humanity 
may take and occupy its place in the larger world of 
nature, one must consider just how the inferior ego was 
led to abandon his place in the world of scientism. 
Modern thought began as no other movement than the 
complete naturalization of the world without and with- 
in; that desire to dominate the individual which in 
Paganism had raised the State above the self, which 
in Mediaevalism had walled the individual within the 
Church, showed itself in the attempt to submerge the 
ego in the scientific, social State. At the same time, the 
subordination of humanity was not so complete as the 
principles of naturalism would seem to indicate. The 
physical view of the world was so closely connected 
with a humanistic conception of mankind that the result 
of the Enlightenment was at once naturistic and human- 
istic. Furthermore, the mathematical notions of the 
times were such as to make the world appear mental; 
whence the new physics had about it a subjectivism 
which ended by saying that our only knowledge is the 
knowledge of ideas. When thought became biological, 
as it did in the nineteenth century, it made the social 
one with the natural, so that a certain amount of human- 
ism was to be found in the midst of the crass natural- 
ism. Then the biological ideals of the age were tempted 
to extend their sway over the psychological; whence 
another method of escape was provided for the indi- 
vidual. The result, as our treatment of The Natural- 
ization of Life showed, was quite ambiguous, in that 
humanity and the individual, far from being driven from 
the field, were enhanced and strengthened by the appli- 
cation of the natural to human life. Like wisdom, 
nature is justified of her children, so that one might 
regard naturalism as a hen which has hatched out a 



4 i8 THE GROUND AND GOAD OF HUMAN DIFE 

duckling, whose aqueous propensities are so surprising 
to the land-bird. 

Even when the conclusions of scientism in both physi- 
cal and biological forms were ambiguous, there went 
abroad the impression that scientism had driven spiritual 
life from the world. Art lost its one-time sway; ethics 
became either utilitarian or formal ; religion was forced 
to submit to scientific cosmology and sociology. But 
the fact remained that the self was still in the world; 
and, even when the principles of outer existence were 
developed so rapidly and so completely as to leave the 
ideals of the inner life far in the rear, man was not 
wholly distanced in the race for the goal of life. At a 
time when life had all but passed into the hands of 
scientism, at a time when the scientific thinker had 
become as dogmatic and intolerant as the scholastic 
theologian, the individualistic revolt asserted the inde- 
pendence of the self in its soul-states. Having no 
means of appreciating these soul-states, scientism had 
looked upon them as so many inward events comparable 
to exterior happenings ; wanting in a sense of taste, 
scientism had reduced all phenomena to a dead level, 
whence one fact became as fine as another, the outer 
as good as the inner. The lack of perspective which 
distorted the picture of the world, was supplied in part 
by the individualistic movement, which brought the self 
to the foreground. It is not to be doubted that indi- 
vidualism exaggerated the importance of the individual's 
private experiences; for, where scientism had made the 
soul-state but one fact among a host of others, individ- 
ualism allowed the inner experience of the soul-state to 
blot out the meaning of the exterior order. The Ironie 
of Schlegel, the culte de soi-meme of Baudelaire, and 
the solipsism of Huysmans in his maisonette, are so 
many examples of this exaggeration. Nevertheless, it 
was just poison which served to cure the soul of its 
naturalistic malady. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 419 

The self still exists! In its unearthliness, its anti- 
naturalness, individualism may have been wrong, but its 
solipsistic sin was a felix culpa. In its romantic, deca- 
dent, symbolistic aestheticism, individualism saved the 
self from the toils of scientism; where taste was needed 
to render the view of nature selective and appropriate, 
such individualism invoked the superfine, the hysterical, 
and the morbid for the purpose of placing the soul-state 
in a different light from that which naturalism was shed- 
ding upon it. No one who has toiled under the sun of 
naturalism can regret the cool shadows of what other- 
wise would be a doubtful philosophy of life. When sci- 
entism played Comte, individualism replied with Stirner ; 
when Mill appeared, Wagner checkmated his utilitarian- 
ism; the naturalism of Darwin was neutralized by the 
Satanism of Baudelaire, while Spencer was no match 
for Ibsen. Erotic, morbid, and lyrical, the individualist 
was still true to humanity; the individualist defended 
the self from the attacks of unscrupulous scientism. 

Scientism has become one of the most unnatural 
movements in the history of human culture. For the 
sake of perfecting its forms, scientism has been as 
vicious as scholasticism in violating the content of its 
own subject matter. Where Scholasticism made relent- 
less use of the abstract, scientism has been as perverse 
in its employment of the analytic; where Scholasticism 
sought the empty general, scientism has been equally 
devoted to the particular. The plea under which sci- 
entism has advanced the culture of the analytic has been 
based upon the notion that truth is to be found in the 
fact; now nature as such does not consist in an array 
of facts or in an immediate assemblage of facts ; nature 
is obviously a systematic whole the comprehension of 
which depends upon a form of culture which is able to 
view the world in its totality. Within the limits of 
mere scientific investigation, the fallacy of scientism as 



4 20 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

a system fails to reveal itself; but, when life seeks to 
reproduce itself through realistic art, the secret becomes 
known. Scientific art, possessed of the idea that it re- 
flects the real as given in experience, attempts to place 
all facts upon the same level, whence the reflection of 
nature assumes the form of a thirteenth-century picture 
with its pathetic lack of depth. The result is the very 
opposite of the natural, for the immediate reproduction 
of the world apart from the ideal background and spir- 
itual atmosphere of the scene produces a false impres- 
sion; whence, the truer the art, the more false it is; 
the truer to the fact, the more false to the idea con- 
tained in the fact. 

In its unnaturalness, realism has made the perceptible 
without to correspond to the pleasurable within; that is, 
as art sought the immediate fact in the exterior order, 
it sought likewise the immediate response in the inner 
one. For the beholder the problem became suspiciously 
simple: perceive the particular fact and enjoy the special 
feeling which that fact arouses, and you have the essence 
of aesthetic enjoyment. If reality were willing to dis- 
play itself in such particular percepts and such particu- 
lar pleasures, scientific art had been a success ; but there 
is about reality a totalizing tendency, whence the par- 
ticular fact in nature is meaningless apart from the 
whole, while the particular feeling in consciousness is 
blind when severed from the fulness of consciousness 
itself. The most natural and obvious impression of the 
world is received when all the self contemplates the 
whole world; the effect becomes strained and unnatural 
when a particular feeling seeks to respond to a definite 
percept, whence nature as a series of phenomena and 
mind as a succession of feelings fail to produce an 
artistic impression. Individualism sought to correct this 
artistic error by postulating the independence of soul- 
states and the unity of the inner life; the result was to 



JOY OF UFE IN THE WORED-WHOLE 421 

divorce the individual from the world to which he owed 
his life and in which he seemed to have his destiny. 
Now that individualism has shown itself capable of a 
more liberal and healthy conception of one's own life, 
it remains to be seen whether the exterior order is 
capable of supporting an explanation which shall re- 
spond to this. 

With all its pretense at sheer realism, science has 
assumed to be naive and disinterested. In considering 
such a claim, individualism is called upon to observe 
two things : whether it is possible for the human mind 
to analyze any problem of the world in complete for- 
getfulness of humanity; whether scientism has actually 
done this in the case of modern naturalism. To con- 
sider the particular claims of scientism first, it may be 
said again, as was said before in reviewing The Nat- 
uralization of Life, that as an historical fact scientism 
took up the work of rendering the world wholly cosmic, 
not for the sake of what it saw in that world, but with 
the aim of freeing man himself from the limitations of 
mediaeval cosmology, whence scientism became human- 
ism. When, in the second period of modern thought, 
scientism passed on to biological considerations, it was 
with the result of establishing a social conception of 
mankind. Thus, instead of establishing a purely cosmic 
or naturalistic conception of the exterior order, scientism 
had the fate to involve just as much of the anthropic as 
had been involved before. Instead of being naive, sci- 
entism revealed much of the care and craft of the 
scholastic period; indeed, where scholasticism demanded 
that art and philosophy should serve theology, scientism 
has demanded that art and philosophy should serve the 
interests of science. It was against such a subsumption 
of the human ego under the new generalization that indi- 
vidualism took up its work of insurrection. 

If the system of scientism has not been disinterested, 



422 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



is it possible for the human mind to contemplate the 
world in a manner wholly non-anthropic ? In seeking 
an answer to this question, one must bear in mind that, 
instead of viewing the world with the intuitions of an 
angel or the perceptions of an animal, man views the 
world after the manner of the human mind as such. 
To speak of " mind " is to indulge in a foolish abstrac- 
tion. The fact that it is the human mind which con- 
templates the world without, keeps thrusting itself for- 
ward in connection with the inevitable distinctions which 
man's mind makes. These humanized distinctions ap- 
pear in the contrast between the phenomenal and the 
real, the sensuous and rational, the free and determined. 
In ultimate reality, if such an idea may be entertained, 
such divisions of thought into an Either-Or cannot be 
said to obtain ; but, in man's reality, philosophic progress 
is made in no other way than this divisive one. The 
secret of this dualism in thought is explicable in the 
light of the humanism which is involved in the various 
questions which arise, so that it seems impossible to 
entertain a view of the world which shall involve the 
human mind apart from humanity itself ; a purely cosmic 
consideration is as false and misleading as the purely 
ecclesiastical ideal of Scholasticism. 

In order to guard against the inevitable humanism of 
all views of the world, individualism is now in a posi- 
tion to present as subject for cosmic contemplation the 
thoroughly unified ego. Where scientism viewed the 
self as that which perceives without and finds pleasure 
within, where Decadence considered the ego as that 
which rejoices in the complete inwardness of rare and 
morbid emotions, a revised individualism is anxious to 
perfect a higher synthesis of self and world, whence 
one may live his own genuine life in a genuine order 
of nature. That which is requisite for such a reunion 
of the self and the world is a more natural conception 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 423 

of the world, the world in independence of Scholas- 
ticism and scientism. About such a higher view of the 
natural order there is nothing mysterious, at any rate 
nothing more mysterious than nature herself ; the higher, 
or trans-scientific, view of the world is found when one 
surveys that world in its manifest totality. Aesthetic 
individualism has no real desire to dismiss nature, since 
nature when viewed naively is the very place of enjoy- 
ment; it is opposition to an academic conception of the 
world in which individualism has indulged. When a 
scientist like Haeckel signifies his desire to intuit the 
world in such a manner as to view in its special forms 
the semblance of the True, Good, and Beautiful, he is 
only expressing this desire to look up from the itemized 
and analytical view of things to a synthetic unity of 
that which seems to possess ideal significance. This 
more liberal conception of the world, which has never 
really forsaken the mind of the artist, is the unum 
necessarium of the superior synthesis of selfhood and 
nature. Given nature in the scientific form of its actu- 
alities, and there can be no sort of communion between 
the individual and the world; but, with the ideal inter- 
pretation of nature in its totality, the reunion is made 
possible. 

To whom does nature belong? Scholasticism sought 
to enclose it in a cloister; scientism has been equally 
unjust in its attempt to imprison it in a laboratory. So 
far as human philosophy is concerned, nature must be 
thought of as belonging to man, to his scholastic sense 
of faith or his scientific sense of truth. But by what 
intellectual right does one assume that nature in passing 
over into the hands of scientism is really in the posses- 
sion of scientism, and by what right does scientism hold 
title to all nature? With the weakness of contemporary 
art, as shown in symbolism, and with the strength of a 
well-intrenched scientism, it seems impossible to advance 



424 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



the obvious proposition that nature is as much the pos- 
session of the contemplating artist as of the observing 
scientist ; yet, if one were to review the history of human 
culture, one would easily find a period in which art had 
the upper hand, as in the days of eighteenth-century 
classicism. With Goethe as poet and Schelling as phi- 
losopher, one has before one the spectacle of nature in 
the possession of art and philosophy combined; some- 
what the same may be said of American culture in the 
days of Emerson and Poe. While, at the present time, 
it is undeniable that nature rests in the hands of sci- 
entism, there to suffer from the tyranny of minds which, 
alas ! are often mediocre and purely imitative, it does 
not follow that nature belongs there, or that she will 
continue to submit to the staid analyses of the scientific 
mind which is now beginning to repeat the things it 
learned from more original minds in the earlier days of 
scientism. Scientism cannot go on to new triumphs ; 
as early as Comte, it declared that the goal had been 
attained. 

The hope of re-establishing a connection between the 
inner self and the outer world seems now to depend 
upon a change from that purely analytical work of 
scientism which resulted in nothing more than the de- 
duction of the actual, to the synthetic activity of thought 
whereby an ideal interpretation of the world will be- 
come possible. All that scientism can be expected to 
yield is fact, form, or force; that which is demanded 
for the reunion of the self and the world is a view of 
the universe in its totality. In the idea of the aestheti- 
cal, both the individualistic and the cosmic may well 
meet; for, where the ethical tends to lay its emphasis 
upon the subject, where the metaphysical changes the 
point of view to the object, the aesthetical is so con- 
stituted that it may include both subject and object in 
one synthesis. The pure subject contemplating the uni- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 425 

fied object blends objective and subjective in one. Just 
as long as scientism persists in viewing the world part 
by part, just as long as egoism contends for an atomic 
and solipsistic view of humanity, just so long will the 
misunderstanding between man and the world continue. 
But, where the world is viewed as a whole while the 
self is looked upon in a trans-egoistic sense, the breach 
between the two realms of thought may be repaired. 

If we look to the aesthetical to overcome the antipathy 
between the two opposed realms, we have a right to 
expect that the aesthetical will realize its major possi- 
bilities as a form of human culture. When the Deca- 
dence severed its connection with metaphysics, as with 
morality also, the artist had before him the spectacle of 
the world viewed under the form of science; and it was 
thus that Baudelaire spoke of poetry as being independ- 
ent of science. But it is reasonable to believe that nature 
has not been exhausted by the scientific method of inves- 
tigation, so that a more liberal and less formal view of 
the world will make possible the participation of the 
self in its own world. It is of course difficult to believe 
that science can be wrong when science ever proceeds 
upon the basis of exact observation and convincing ex- 
periment ; but the exactness and certainty of science are 
confined to a disintegrated view of the natural order, 
and when the totality of the world is made the object 
of consideration the special formulas of scientism are 
of no avail. Thus, it is not that science is incorrect, 
but that it is incomplete ; where it has established rational 
connection among the phenomena of nature in partic- 
ular, it has not supplied an ideal interpretation of these 
phenomena as a whole. As a result, there has arisen 
between a scientific view of the world and an ideal 
interpretation of life an antinomy which can be removed 
only as the scientific conception of things yields to a 
more generous interpretation of the world-order. 



426 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

The conflict of art with science, which is the com- 
plement of the warfare of science with religion, should 
have the effect of promoting a more fluid conception of 
the world. Why the religionist assumed the attitude of 
defense alone is for the religionist to explain, but it is 
not necessary for the artist to apologize for his attitude 
toward science. Apart from the school of realism, 
which vainly endeavored to imitate the scientific method 
of exact observation and naturalistic explanation, the 
art of the nineteenth century, however extravagant its 
special ideals may have been, revealed its loyalty to the 
idea of beauty, of art as absolute. Far from surrender- 
ing to the dictates of scientism, aestheticism rejoiced in 
its own light, so that the more insistent was scientism, 
the more perverse was art. To recall the names of Poe 
and Baudelaire, Huysmans and Wilde, Hauptmann and 
Maeterlinck, is to remember that aestheticism stood fast 
in the liberty of its own freedom. But the work of the 
decadent was only a half-work; the completion of his 
artistic endeavor appears in a newer and larger view of 
the world, in which the self may find its true place. 

2. The Aesthetic Synthesis with Humanity 

Where the aesthetic synthesis with nature tends to 
overcome the antipathy between the self and the world 
as this was aroused by The Naturalisation of Life, the 
aesthetic synthesis of the self and humanity should save 
the individual from The Socialization of Life. Of the 
two movements, the latter was the more inimical, inas- 
much as the actual socialization of life had its direct 
effect upon the will, while the naturalization of life was 
but suggestive to the intellect. Under the auspices of 
naturalism, one might still hold fast to his sense of 
selfhood and be guilty of no more than absurdity; but 
opposition to the social order involved the practical will 
in real difficulty. With life viewed as so much natural- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 427 

ism, the face of nature was not really altered; but with 
life organized socially, the character of humanity be- 
came essentially different. By nature a social creature, 
man has been called upon to witness the extra-social- 
ization of his life, as this has been brought about by 
the socialization of labor. Against this practical assem- 
bling of human egos, against this excessive inter-relating 
of human wills, aestheticism as Decadence insisted upon 
an independent inner life which, the more morbid it 
became, the less likely its identification with the exterior 
social order. 

The reunion of the self with the human order is to 
come about only as philosophy is able to effect a higher 
synthesis of individual and society. Such a reunion is 
not to submerge the individual in the social, but to relate 
the individual to the order which has the right to claim 
him as its own. The individual still exists ! The bland 
social thinker who opposes what he calls " individual- 
ism," still has in mind the impossible ego of the En- 
lightenment, the punctual individual who entertained the 
vain idea that his life was by nature solitary, while the 
realization of this life was supposed to consist in the 
indulgence of self-love. If this ego has passed away, 
its place has been taken by another and more real ex- 
ample of individualism, the aesthetic ego of the nine- 
teenth century. Realizing the hold which the social had 
upon him, the aesthetic ego went to every extreme with 
the aim of asserting a sort of social solipsism. Con- 
sidered by itself, such decadent egoism could not be 
condemned too thoroughly; but, viewed as an attempt 
to deliver the human self from the toils of the social 
order, decadent egoism must be praised for its desire 
to place the individual in a position outside of the social 
world-order, dehors du monde. The particular method 
employed by the decadent ego was that of eudaemonism, 
the insistence upon the joy of life as such. Where the 



428 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

social order failed to show itself the true place of joy, 
decadence set about elaborating inward joys of the ego's 
own devising. 

Sociality has been one of the most inhuman of move- 
ments in the history of ethics. With the apparent aim 
of arranging life for the sons of men, sociality has per- 
fected an abstract system of benefit to all and none. 
The ancient State with its innocence of individualism, 
the mediaeval Church with its insistence upon the catho- 
lic or whole in religion, and modern Society with its 
devotion to abstract sociality, are so many examples 
of anti-individualism; of the three, the last-mentioned 
would seem to be the most relentless. Sociality has 
assumed that one might express the meaning of life 
by bringing individuals together; indeed, sociality has 
had no other idea than that of togetherness. When the 
ancient thinker built the individual into the State as a 
real edifice, his State was an aesthetico-political reality; 
when the mediaevalist subsumed man under the idea of 
a Church, his Church was a politico-religious reality; 
but the modern social thinker has sought to assemble 
souls under the form of an idea which in itself has no 
spiritual content, whence Stirner felt justified in styling 
it a " spook," while Ibsen called it a " ghost." Remove 
all individuals from the ancient State, and Plato could 
still consider that State as having some kind and degree 
of reality; let all egos forsake the mediaeval Church, 
and Aquinas might still entertain the idea of the Church 
as such; but, deprive the modern idea of Society of all 
particular individuals, and that idea falls to the ground. 
Like the modern ideal of scientism in nature, the notion 
of sociality is wanting in a third dimension; so that, 
where it may exercise some degree of sway over the 
unthinking individual, it has no real hold upon the idea 
of humanity. 

To whom does the idea of humanity belong? Social- 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 429 

ity has assumed that, by its very nature as a general 
idea, humanity belongs to social thought; the individual 
may have humanity only as he approaches it through 
sociality. This raises the question, Where is humanity 
to be found : in the individual or in society ? It is most 
natural to regard humanity in' extenso as a general 
notion calculated to cover all individuals; the idea of 
humanity is thus formed after the manner of the well- 
known logical concept. Yet, this method of assembling 
souls under a formal notion is far from conserving the 
content of humanity as that which is lived within after 
the manner of the joy of life. The looser method of 
collectivism and the stricter practice of social synthesis 
perfects its unity only as it ignores the most character- 
istic elements of human existence. The grand result of 
such an assembling fails to yield the idea of humanity 
as this idea has been experienced and expressed by man- 
kind in the free. The social thinker has followed the 
analogy of scientism by means of which plants and 
animals have been arranged in compact and convenient 
groups. Where the particulars involved have no inner 
life, no sense of life in its totality, the fallacy of the 
composition has not been so threatening; but, where 
these particulars are none other than human individuals 
with their inherent sense of life's meaning and life's joy, 
the emptiness of the generalization has become painfully 
apparent. 

But what is there to " humanity " that fails to respond 
to the smooth social synopsis? In reply to such a ques- 
tion, the individualist comes forth with the answer that 
humanity is just as likely to be a quality which attaches 
to an individual as an idea which arches over him. 
While most of the reasoning concerning humanity has 
had to do with a purely substantival form, much of the 
actual experience of humanity has expressed itself in 
an adjectival manner, as though humanity were a mood 



43° 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



to be cultivated, a character of life to be promoted. 
From the adjectival point of view, there may be just as 
much humanity in the individual as in the race. One 
might perhaps seek to adjust the substantival and social 
conception of humanity to the adjectival and individual- 
istic by pointing out how the ratio essendi of humanity 
is found in the individual, while the ratio cognoscendi 
is reserved for the social. The humanity of the Greeks 
found one way of existing in such individuals as Plato 
and Socrates, Sophocles and Phidias, while it was in a 
different manner that this humanity expressed itself in 
the Greeks as a people. Given the concrete humanity 
of the individual, the humanistic generalization becomes 
possible; but, ignore the independent humanity of the 
self, and the generalization falls to the ground. 

It would seem, then, that there are two humanities, 
that which concerns the individual as the quality of his 
inner life and that which assumes only the quantitative 
form of a generalization. In the case of the beast, there 
is but one kind of animality, and with the beast the 
general impress of the species is the important factor. 
With mankind, however, due room must be made, not 
only for individualistic differences incident upon the 
principle of individuation, but also for the universally 
distributed sense of inwardness which is open to each 
individual. With the animal, the bond of union in the 
species is exterior, due as it is to the common reaction 
upon nature; with men, the connecting principle is due 
to the interior consciousness of one spiritual nature. 
For this reason, the social endeavor to assemble men 
under a general head should have about it something 
more than a biological basis; it should recognize the 
ethical quality of the humanistic synthesis. Herding is 
common in higher forms of life, but the herding instinct 
fails to operate as the genuine synthesis of human souls 
with their special sense of inward enjoyment and inward 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 431 

realization. In contrast with minor humanity, which is 
content with the exterior assembling of men under an 
idea, there is a major humanity which seeks to postulate 
a real and worthy bond between individuals with a 
characteristic inner life. Upon the basis of this superior 
synthesis rests the hope of establishing a reunion of the 
individual and society. 

By emphasizing the distinction between qualitative 
ethical humanism and quantitative biological sociality, 
one begins to understand just how the word " human- 
ity " should be employed. When the characteristic in 
humanity becomes the point of departure, it becomes 
possible to see how a special individual may have the 
power to convey the meaning of humanity when this 
power is not applicable to men in the mass. This ap- 
pears in the instance of the genius, the very word indi- 
cating the thought that the generic or total significance 
of mankind is to be found in isolation. Not only in the 
special case of the genius, but in the aesthetic conscious- 
ness generally does the characteristic ideal of humanity 
appear. In art, the principle of aesthetic judgment ex- 
presses the notion that the feeling of beauty which gives 
private pleasure is the basis of a judgment of taste, to 
the effect that such beauty which pleases is calculated 
to give similar pleasure to all mankind. When the aes- 
thetic feeling in order to become aesthetic assumes the 
form of disinterestedness, it conveys in itself the sense 
of all mankind; conscious of beauty, the individual is 
conscious of all humanity. The universal idea of hu- 
manity, instead of being reached in exterior manner as 
a generalization, is acquired by perfect interiorization ; 
perfect enjoyment has begotten perfect sympathy. If 
it be true that beauty can save the world of men, it is 
because the appreciation of beauty depends for its exist- 
ence upon an aestheticism in which the total sense of 
humanity is the invariable accompaniment of that sense 
of beauty. 



43 2 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



To the scientific and social thinker, the masters of the 
present age, the claims of aesthetic humanism and the 
hope that art will serve as the means of uniting men 
•will seem psychologically empty and logically absurd. 
That beauty saves the world by creating an aesthetic 
sense of the unity of mankind is a proposition whose 
validity depends upon the nature of the idea, " human- 
ity." If humanity be taken to signify nought but the 
biological being and social existence of men, then beauty 
can mean little more than so much artless entertainment ; 
but, if there be another sense attaching to the term 
" humanity," then it may be possible to attribute to the 
aesthetical the soteriological office so naively suggested 
by the Russian epileptic whose fits revealed to him " the 
highest synthesis of life." In the common conscious- 
ness of mankind, there exists a double doctrine of hu- 
manity : here it is aesthetic humanism based upon cul- 
ture ; there it is ethical humanitarianism based upon 
biology. The first doctrine is. ancient, the second mod- 
ern ; the earlier doctrine sought the unity of mankind 
within, the later dogma abandoned the inner for the 
outer. Where one conception of humanity is concerned 
with individual humanism as a quality of soul, the other 
is interested in social humanism as a type of exterior 
life. Where inner humanism expressed the general 
sentiment that beauty had power to bind men to one 
another, outer, social humanism looks to industry to 
effect the union of all souls. Here, it is the aristocratic 
and superior in mankind, there the altruistic and sym- 
pathetic which receives the emphasis. Convinced of the 
essential unity within, the older humanist was careless 
of the exterior realization of this in society; despairing 
of a mutual, inward understanding in the doubtful realm 
of spiritual life, the social humanist has taken his stand 
upon the exterior conditions of mankind in the world. 
All that aesthetic humanism is interested to assert is that 
such an aesthetic humanism exists as a fact. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 433 

If beauty as beauty cannot wholly save the world, it 
may point to the aesthetic realm of life in which the 
unity of man with man may be effected. Up to the 
present time, when the sensuous life of humanity has 
been the point of departure for social theory, it has been 
the sense of common happiness that has been supposed 
to bring about mutual understanding. Unfortunately 
for the hedonic method of synthesizing the sons of men, 
happiness is one of the most disintegrating of human 
tendencies in human life. Utilitarianism may set up its 
proud ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number; but when individuals seek happiness, they find 
themselves in mutual disagreement. The same may be 
said of a more materializing conception of immediate 
welfare, that of utility. The social thinker as pacifist 
and Utopian has been fond of pointing to industrialism 
as the cure of militarism; where the code of militarism 
has had the effect of disintegrating men, the code of 
industrialism, by pointing out the community of life- 
interest and the interdependence necessary for world- 
commerce, has been supposed to supply a bond of union 
among all wills. If the recent war is a criterion, one 
may argue that, instead of producing amity, commerce 
has the effect of arousing enmity among the nations of 
the world. Where the principles of pleasure and utility 
have the effect of working divisively, the principles of 
art and culture seem to raise mankind above that sense 
of enmity which makes man to man a wolf, homo homini 
lupus. If the aesthetic consciousness cannot save the 
world by creating the sense of a common spiritual life 
within, the commercial consciousness is still farther from 
producing a sense of community among the exterior 
interests of mankind. 

Raw humanity working in the world of sense is in no 
condition to come to an understanding with mankind. 
But, where man cultivates his inherent humanity, even 



434 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

when that involves certain extremes of individualism, he 
is not far from the kingdom of peace. It was in appre- 
ciation of this fact that Fichte was led to say, " Noth- 
ing in the world of sense, nothing which concerns our 
acts or affections, has value except as it makes for 
culture." 4 The same principle obtains among nations : 
where the national aim is economic, it is most difficult 
for that nation to come to agreement with other nations ; 
where " sweetness and light " guide a people, the nation 
is in a condition where international agreement is not 
far to seek. Here again, Fichte has a word of wisdom 
to offer : " The culture of freedom should be the end 
of national unity." 5 In contrast with the commerce- 
state, which is ever ready for war, the culture-state 
constantly deepens the cause of peace. Nations fight to 
defend their commerce; culture needs no exterior de- 
fense. It would seem then that the office of the aes- 
thetical is to cultivate the humanity which slumbers in 
the individual and the individual nation; this done, it 
becomes possible to promote peace and the genuine unity 
of men with men. 

Where humanity depends upon the benefits which 
come from culture, it becomes possible to share these 
benefits without causing sacrifice; but, where pleasure 
or material benefit is the aim of society, the wealth of 
one is the poverty of the other. Since cultural goods 
can be shared without division, the aesthetical is emi- 
nently fitted to become the basis of the humanistic syn- 
thesis. In the instance of national culture, the member 
of the nation becomes a direct participant in the aes- 
thetic life of the whole order, while the nation itself has 
the opportunity to elaborate a type of artistic life pecu- 
liar to its own genius. In this manner, England has 
become utilitarian, France dilettant, Germany dogmatic, 
Russia nihilistic, although in each case the adjective 

*WerJce, VI, 86. 6 lb., 101. 



JOY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 435 

should be taken to signify something meritorious. Since 
aestheticism evokes the humanity of the individual, it 
is calculated to evince the larger humanity of the race, 
whence the synthesis of the individual and society be- 
comes possible. The more intensive the culture, the 
more extensive it is; and, if the cultural is capable of 
uniting the individual with his own nation, it is none 
the less capable of effecting the synthesis of nation and 
nation in one domain of beauty, the beauty which saves 
the world. 

Culture, which is itself but a means to an end, sets 
before the mind the ideal of a perfect humanity, com- 
plete in both character and extent. Great as has been 
the emphasis which human thought has laid upon the 
idea of man, it may safely be assumed that the idea of 
humanity has been left to take care of itself. Human- 
ity is an ideal which has fallen between the two stools 
of the Natural here and the Absolute there, whence that 
which is of neither Earth alone nor Heaven alone has 
been sorely neglected. Religion with its avowed pref- 
erence for the heavenly Absolute has not been permitted 
to perfect that idea of an intrinsic human life which 
has always been implicit in its beliefs and strivings. 
Art with its suggestions of sense and immediate enjoy- 
ment has been similarly frustrated in its manifest desire 
to create man in its own image. Art has been looked 
upon for the mere adornment of the world of things, 
the mere entertainment of the human beholder. Religion 
has been expected to answer questions concerning remote 
possibilities, when it is of the very genius of religion to 
elaborate the inner life of man on earth. Culture is 
artistic and religious in one and the same moment; it 
is artistic because it ever emphasizes the inward sense 
of enjoyment, religious because it warns man that life- 
satisfaction is to be found in some sense of remoteness. 
Life as actually experienced postulates the aesthetic 



28 



436 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

synthesis of the self with the world. Every effort to 
promote human life has been an endeavor to perfect the 
relations obtaining between man and the world. Such 
is the synthetic unity of the self, nature, and humanity. 



PART TWO 

THE WORTH OF LIFE IN THE 
WORLD-WHOLE 

THE search for the higher synthesis in the 
realm of joy revealed the power of the self 
to assert its inner nature in the form of aes- 
thetic satisfaction, whence reunion with nature and 
humanity became possible through culture. By means 
of such a higher synthesis, the conflict between aes- 
theticism here and the scientifico-social there was over- 
come. When the same synthetic method is applied to 
the problem of life's value, it becomes necessary to 
inquire whether the self as will can transcend its im- 
moralistic pessimism and adapt itself to the world as 
a world of values. The atmosphere of the second in- 
quiry must be ethical where the auspices under which 
the first question was considered were aesthetical. The 
particular form which the question of the practical syn- 
thesis of the self and the world must consider is that 
of work. For the purpose of answering the question 
whether man has a genuine work in the world, one 
must first consider what is really meant by the idea of 
one's own work; then it should be possible to consider 
whether a free and intelligible idea of work in the world 
is such as to make possible the practical synthesis of 
the self with the world of nature and humanity. Where 
the scientific and the social have tended to suggest that 
man no longer has a work in the world, individualism 
has responded by setting up its ideals of immoralistic 
willing and of pessimistic negation. If the nihilism of 
the individualistic movement is to be overcome, it will 
be necessary to re-examine the character of human will- 



438 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ing to see whether it is not possible to bring about a 
reunion of the will with the exterior order of nature 
and humanity. The particular phase of the work-prob- 
lem appears in connection with the idea of " charac- 
ter " ; not whether the individual himself has private 
character, but whether the life of action is such as to 
produce that which is characteristic of man. 

I. ONE'S OWN WORK 

It was the fate of individualism to insist upon the will 
rather than the work of the ego ; that which resulted 
from this was the contention for the ego's free initiative 
and the value of its volitions. In taking up the question 
of the ego's work in the world, philosophy of life has 
no right to attempt any higher synthesis of the self and 
the world unless these contentions be met : within, the 
will must spring freely from its own initiative; with- 
out, the will must have the privilege of creating values. 
Where the interpretation of the world is such as to 
forbid the initiatory " I will," the idea of work cannot 
be true; where the arrangement of the world is such as 
to deprive the will of the right to create values, the char- 
acter of work cannot be said to have worth. If the 
aesthetic view of the world, as this has just been enter- 
tained, is such as to grant self-existence to the human 
ego, it is to be hoped that there may be an ethical con- 
ception also in the light of which the ego will be 
accorded due self-expression. If life seems capable of 
culture, it should appear none the less capable of char- 
acter; and as the scientifico-social conception of things 
was forced to ignore culture, so it will be found equally 
careless of character. And as the individual has learned 
to trust in culture as a means of taking one's place in 
the world, so he must learn to believe in the character 
of life in which true worth is to be found. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 439 

1. The; Truth of Work in Nature; 

Where earlier modern thought feared the idea of self- 
existence lest it lead to solipsism, it was none the less 
anxious lest the desire for self-expression might end in 
egoism. But he who appreciates the fact that scientism 
has such a hold upon the mind that the dread of solipsism 
is ill-founded, will be none the less appreciative of the 
idea that, with the sway of sociality, the modern is far 
removed from the possibilities of egoism. Would that 
there might be some genuine dread of a speculative 
solipsism and a practical egoism ; then one could believe 
that the hold which the scientific and social now enjoy 
were not so firm as it appears to be. However anti- 
egoistic the practical world may seem to be, the indi- 
vidualist is cheered by the hope that, when the true 
nature of work is presented, the " I will " of individual- 
ism may be in a position to look upon its spontaneous 
volitions as constituting genuine work. 

(1) Work as Creative 

With all its strength of volition, individualism lacked 
one thing, an object of volition. Perhaps it was because 
individualism could find nothing worthy upon which the 
"I will" might rest; still the fact remains that self- 
willed individualism set up as the object of volition 
either the self or the nought. "What shall I will?" 
was a question which individualism could answer in no 
substantial manner, as one may learn from interrogating 
the pages of Emerson and Stirner, the dramas of Wag- 
ner and Ibsen. At times, the militant egoist feared lest 
he become superfluous in the midst of his superiority, 
anti-social in the midst of his self-will ; yet he could find 
nothing in the scientifico-social order which attracted 
him. When, however, individualism attempts to correct 
its own errors, individualism realizes that the one thing 



440 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

needful is a conception of volition which shall read into 
will the meaning of work, and translate work in terms 
of character. In this spirit, activistic egoism is now 
casting about for a conception of willing which shall 
avoid the extremes of the idle, the vicious, the nihil- 
istic, while it shall conserve the fundamental principle of 
spontaneity. Life has become so unutterably socialized 
and the individual is so thoroughly individualized that 
the reunion of the two seems all but impossible; yet, is 
not this reunion possible? 

The answer to this question is to be found in the idea 
of the creativeness which seems to reside both in the 
powers of the will and in the plastic nature of the world. 
The pre-voluntaristic philosophy, as this labored on until 
the dawning of the nineteenth century, had no problem 
of work to solve, because it had no ideal of world- 
activity to present. In Classicism, the idea of work was 
prohibited by the fixed and limited character which the 
idea of the world assumed in the mind : man could 
imitate nature in art, could copy the world of ideas in 
the mind which sought truth in the criterion of cor- 
respondence of thought and thing, but nothing essential 
and novel could be done. In Scholasticism, the will 
was called upon to conform to the authoritarian, but all 
attempts at a free initiative were limited by the wall of 
the Church. In Rationalism, the active ego could do 
no more than strive to know the true to which it must 
submit with something like the cheerfulness of Spinoza 
in his " acquiescence." Where, as in the case of Kant 
and Fichte, the will seemed about to break down the 
barriers of reason, the beginning and end of action were 
bounded by relentless moral imperativeness. The com- 
ing of voluntarism finds the ego circumscribed by the 
scientific and the social, but it is doubtful whether these 
inferior and secular forms of restraint can longer pro- 
hibit and prevent the self-assertion of the individual, 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 441 

who is determined to will both himself and his work. 
For, if the Positivist and Agnostic suggest that there is 
no Beyond for the intellect, they cannot convince the 
individual that there is no Beyond for the will; man 
has decided to will himself freely and fully, even where 
this may lead him to the irrationalistic and immoralistic, 
the anti-natural and anti-social. For this reason, it has 
become necessary to indicate the way in which the will 
can best proceed. The voluntaristic within and the 
activistic without give a new face to the problem of the 
truth of work. 

When once we raise the question, " What shall man 
will ? " we are placed in a position where no common- 
place answer can avail. In the solution of this problem, 
some help may come from an appeal to the parallel case 
of cognition, where arises the question, " What can man 
know ? " In considering these twin interrogations, let 
it be borne in mind that philosophy has been as ready 
to question one as the other; both genuine knowledge 
and essential activity have been the subject of skep- 
ticism, although it must be said that, since the days of 
Socrates, it has usually been assumed that the problem 
of action was more easily solved than that of knowledge. 
It is undeniable that, as the mind can perceive the indi- 
vidual object, so the will can perform the particular act; 
but with such particular facts neither the intellect nor 
the will is satisfied. The mind thinks the world as a 
whole; but is this the case with the will? Is the will 
"not only free, but almighty " ? There are plenty of 
examples of a philosophic in which the command to 
will naught is clearly expressed, as a glance at Taoism, 
Vedanta, Christianity, and modern pessimism will show; 
but is it so easy to affirm a categorical imperative which 
shall counsel, " Will all " ? In the first place, however 
paradoxical it may appear, the ideal of willing the 
nought is paramount to that of willing the all; for the 



442 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN UFE 



negativistic ideal, far from neutralizing the activistic 
one, includes the thought that, in refraining from the 
affirmation of everything in its particularity, the will is 
but preparing for a volition which shall aim at things 
in their totality, whence it seems that man wills all or 
nought. Examples of this universal volition may be 
found in aesthetics, wherein the work of art is a volition 
which creates the typical and universal in the object, 
in ethics, where the commandment is intrinsic and im- 
perative, in religion, where the self affirms its being in 
all the unity of its nature ; so that a work of art, a moral, 
or a religious affirmation is an expression of the mind 
willing the world as a whole. 

Now that upon which the truth of life seems to depend 
is the ability of the individual to will the idea, to express 
his nature in the ideo-volitional. Had we not the vol- 
untaristic psychology of contemporary thought, it were 
difficult to establish the idea that the will, which seems 
to be so ready to come forth in response to something 
good and desiderative, was no less ready to reply to the 
abstractness of an idea. It is true that human culture 
has ever afforded examples of such ideo-volitional activ- 
ity, as the foregoing instances of art, ethics, and religion 
cannot fail to show; but the truth of this activism does 
not repose upon the surface of these splendid forms of 
human activity. In art, man wills an intuition the 
essential nature of which is more intellectual than other- 
wise. The thing of beauty is both joyous and con- 
vincing; it contains both satisfactions and truths. The 
ideational character of the aesthetic, which might not 
appear at once in the artistic creation and aesthetic con- 
templation of the particular statue or canvas, refuses to 
be hidden when the mind sets about establishing norms 
of taste, whence arise in ideational form the types and 
schools known as classic, romantic, realistic. In these 
elaborations of the beautiful, there is a largesse which 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 443 

can find expression in no other form than the intel- 
lectual, even where their immediate products in definite 
works of art are capable of a less advanced interpre- 
tation. If the artist does not work for the creation of 
an idea, if the beholder looks for no such intellectualism, 
the artistico-aesthetic principle as a unity gives expres- 
sion to nothing else. 

The same ideo-volitional quality makes its presence 
felt in the familiar principles of the ethical; here, it is 
no longer the norm of taste, but the ideal of moral judg- 
ment. As in the case of the aesthetical, one does not 
need to assume that the individual in the performance 
of a special duty or in the pursuit of a definite virtue 
is guilty of such moral pedantry as to involve in his 
act the whole plan of his ethical philosophy; for we do 
not expect the rigorist to weight his act with the pon- 
derous Categorical Imperative, or the hedonist to keep 
before his eyes the Greatest Good of the Greatest Num- 
ber. Nevertheless, when the moral habit has established 
itself with a race or in a period of history, the mind 
finds the ethical expressing itself after the manner of 
the ancient Good and the modern Duty. That which 
was first an immediate appeal to the will has finally 
become an ideo-volitional affair in which the truth of 
life as then conceived found its expression. 

Religion, with its ideal of Godhead, has not been 
wanting in this same responsiveness to a remote idea; 
and, even where certain periods in the history of human 
worship have sought to employ useful fictions for the 
achieving of temporary results, the truth of life has not 
failed to break through the utilitarian tissue. The re- 
ligious devotee performs this or that act, whether cere- 
monial or moral, with an eye to the immediate per- 
formance and the direct consequence; but the totality 
of the act on the part of all worshippers establishes 
itself in an intellectual fashion as a permanent, silent 



444 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

idea. In this manner, Buddhistic and Christian chari- 
ties, no matter how immediate and expedient they may 
have seemed in the act of performance, have assumed 
an ideational character in the culture of mankind. Now, 
had there been nothing of the intellectual in the acts 
themselves, it would be difficult to explain how the 
religious form of activity had been kept by the mind 
of man. Thus, it seems to follow that, with all its 
desiderative qualities, human action is such that man 
may will an idea, be it a norm, an ideal, or a belief; 
in the ideo-volition, the truth of life does not fail to 
appear; creation and ideation go hand in hand in the 
larger work of humanity in the world. 

(2) Work as Intelligible 

The possibility of such a voluntaristic participation 
in the work of the world is assured to the will when 
the essential character of the world is more closely ana- 
lyzed, while the answer to the question, " How is work 
possible ? " comes immediately in the idea, Time. As 
the world is given to the mind in the general form of 
experience, it is soon found to express its secret in a 
temporalistic form, since existence, instead of consti- 
tuting itself a placid system of Being, is just as thor- 
oughly a scheme of Behavior. To be is to exist and to 
express forms; but to be is none. the less to act and to 
reveal functions. This activistic and, as it were, func- 
tional conception of the world is of advantage meta- 
physically in placing the problem of the Real in the 
proper light; for, instead of constituting a sphere where 
one could find only the opposed poles of noumenal and 
phenomenal, thing and quality, substance and attribute, 
the Real has its zones of change, causality, and time, in 
which the connection between reality and appearance 
becomes evident. For this reason, the apprehension of 
the world is not dependent upon conception and per- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 445 

ception alone, but has to do with volition as well; 
whence one may think the world, perceive the world, 
and will the world. At the same time, when the ego 
endeavors to put his will into the world, he discovers 
that the ontological character of the world is such as, 
not to forbid, but to invite just such participation and 
possession. 

The more definite methods by which the will seeks 
its place in and its possession of the world appear in 
connection with certain forms of humanistic culture, 
which have at heart no other principle than the one just 
mentioned, the active possession of the world. Knock- 
ing, seeking, asking, are followed by opening, finding, 
giving. In art, the sensuous activity of the creative will 
has the effect of fixating the fleeting impression whose 
aesthetic enjoyment thus becomes permanent, as " a 
thing of beauty is a joy forever." In the animal con- 
sciousness, as also to some extent in the uncultured 
mind, the same impression, instead of assuming the 
place as a first among equals, is merely an experience 
which has its place among others, which flow on in 
the same stream. Art, however, exercises the power of 
realizing the impression by eternalizing it, whence the 
fleeting and sensuous becomes permanent and spiritual. 
In a similar manner, the ethical act is derived from the 
elasticity of the will, which proceeds outwards in a 
fashion purely temporary and opportune. By means of 
such ethical eternalization, an impulse becomes an idea, 
and man is said to " act," and not merely to move. It 
matters not whether the ethical act assumes the form of 
a classic virtue or of a romantic duty; its metaphysical 
character as a permanent object has been established in 
the form of the truth of the will. Religion, likewise, is 
capable of the same dialectical interpretation, for it is 
of the very genius of religion to take things temporal 
and make them eternal. The special form of willing 



446 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

which appears in religion is best expressed as " affirma- 
tion " ; for, where art employs sense, and morality the 
will, religion proceeds by the expression of the inner 
self in its totality. 

When, now, we endeavor to assure ourselves of the 
truth of life, as this should come through the creative 
activity of the will, we find that art, ethics, and religion 
afford genuine examples of the ego's attempt to verify 
his life by willing the characteristic features of the 
world; whence these, no longer viewed as temporal, 
become eternal and true. If the world were sheer sub- 
stance, no such eternalizing work could be done; if it 
were purely phenomenal and attributive, the attempt to 
mould it would be as bricks without straw; but, since 
the world is also activistic, the will may evince the truth 
of life by exercising the creative activities of art, mor- 
ality, and religion. From this dialectical analysis of the 
world as a form of activity, it would seem to follow 
that man has a work in the world; if he fails to find it 
or to perform it, the blame must be his own, for the 
phenomenal is ripe for reality, while time is ready for 
eternity. 

It remains to be discovered whether the will is able 
and willing to respond to the invitation so readily held 
out to it in the plastic universe; we have answered the 
question, " What shall man will ? " and must now in- 
quire whether man really possesses the will to work in 
the world. The behavior of the will is such that, with- 
out much difficulty, one can see how easily human voli- 
tions respond to the immediacies of inclination and con- 
sequence, the one ante-volitional, the other post-voli- 
tional; is there also an intra- volitional form of activity? 
The volition of inclination expresses itself most clearly 
in the form of desire, whence the individual is led to 
seek either that which seems to promise immediate 
pleasure or a more remote and general form of self- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 447 

gratification. At this point, we need not plunge too 
deeply into the psychology of desire, and thus dispute 
whether the desiderative is so pledged to the pleasurable 
that one cannot possibly desire the painful ; for, in either 
case, the fact would remain that man naturally and 
immediately sought that which seemed to him to be 
good and satisfying. It may be assumed, then, that 
volition is desiderative, but not to the exclusion of 
other springs of action. On the other hand, it appears 
that the volitional subject has an eye to the remote 
consequences of the act which he is about to perform, 
whence the direct inclination at the beginning must 
give way before the anticipation of the enjoyable con- 
sequences at the end of the activity. In character, the 
consequential form of volition is in no wise different 
from that of inclination; both participate in the desid- 
erative, differing only in the temporal reference. One 
desires food, just as one desires the money which will 
buy the food. Nevertheless, life is not so surrendered 
to the immediate that human volition should depend 
upon mere inclination and desire; there are other mo- 
tives in the mind. 

2. Ths Worth of Work 

The obvious necessity of work in both physical and 
ethical forms has already been given due recognition, 
so that the discussion of worth and work need not be 
detained by a resumption of this idea. Still, it may be 
pointed out that, as the necessitarian character of activ- 
ity could not prevent the extra idea of the truth of 
work, so it is likely that the companion idea of worth 
may be found to transcend the simple notion of physical 
and moral imperatives. Where work has been found to 
create truths, it should also be efficient in elaborating 
values, and only as it exceeds itself and bears human- 
istic fruit can it be anything more than a form of 



448 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

physical energy. Man does more than exist in the 
world; he lives his own human life there; in the same 
way, man does more than act in the world; he performs 
a world-work. As a creator of human truths, which 
are verified by work, so is man the maker of human 
values, which are to be tested by his employment of 
them. With this introduction to the subject of human 
work as that which has worth, it becomes necessary to 
analyze human activity in order that the essence of 
work may be considered more clearly. When the idea 
of work is thus subjected to close scrutiny, it appears 
that worthy human action is at once, eudaemonistic, 
characteristic, and intelligible. 

(i) The Eudaemonistic Element in Work 

The discussion of the topic, One's Own Life, brought 
us to the point at which the idea of work had to give 
way to that of culture, inasmuch as activity seemed to 
fail at the place where it pretended to supply the indi- 
vidual with the means and method of being himself. 
In spite of the shortcomings which the factor of work 
has been found to contain, we need not conclude against 
work altogether, or deny that in activity there is some- 
thing of the joy of life; nevertheless, the attempt to 
evince the eudaemonistic character of work must pro- 
ceed critically and with caution. Certain it is that one 
cannot rashly idealize the industrialism of our present- 
day life with the high-sounding phrase, " The dignity 
of labor," for the brutality and dullness of our laboring 
class is a perpetual and convincing contention against 
any such mock idealism. Furthermore, it is to be ques- 
tioned whether the romantic minds which have deduced 
and applied this subtle expression were really sincere; 
for one can easily suspect that it was for some sinister 
purpose that the idea of labor was thus plated with 
golden sentiment that work might continue to serve 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 449 

those who were making vicious use of the laborer's 
activities. There may indeed be some joy attributable 
to human work ; there is a great deal more sorrow ; so 
that it were more sincere to indulge in a philosophical 
cruelty and thus say that, for weal or woe, the work of 
the world shall go on: this is the unexpressed and per- 
haps unconscious logic of capitalism. 

When individualism speaks of work as something 
felicific, it would be understood to mean that the activity 
itself, and not the exterior fruits of the work, is capable 
of creating a conscious joy. Upon what principles of 
the human will does this tenet depend? In opposition 
to a bald hedonism with its assumption that life is real- 
ized through pleasures which merely receive and register 
the kinds and degrees of sensation of which the mind 
is capable, eudaemonism asserts that genuine joy comes 
only as the mind arouses itself to activity. Passive 
hedonism, as this was exploited originally in the Garden 
of Epicurus, finds it impossible to effect any unity 
among the pleasurable sensations from which the mind 
hopes to secure permanent satisfaction, so that the at- 
tempt to have joy without action has been found to be a 
vain one. The doctrine of ataraxy, which claims that 
the highest joy consists in indifference to desire, seems 
to close forever the gate of the hedonic garden ; hence 
one turns from the quiet hedonism of Epicurus to the 
energistic eudaemonism of Aristotle. 

With the energistic ideal of joy, whence one con- 
cludes that it is energy which promotes pleasure, it 
becomes possible to assert that the end of happiness is 
reached in the proper functioning of the mind's activi- 
ties; the reception of pleasant sensations is not suffi- 
cient, for one must react upon them. Enjoyment thus 
becomes a kind of exercise; and, since the individual 
has powers, it seems to follow without argument that 
these powers are to be employed, if one expects to find 



450 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN UFE 

joy in the world. Even intellectualism, with its con- 
tentions in favor of culture as the true life for man, 
must pay some tribute to the energistic ideal, and thus 
admit that it is not the mind alone, but the activity of 
the mind, which has the secret of joy in life. To the 
extent that joy may be considered the end of life, it 
may be asserted that such a eudaemonistic ideal must be 
set up in the light of man's nature as such ; and, since 
man's nature is largely active, his mind essentially func- 
tional, it is not hard to conclude in favor of energistic 
eudaemonism. If man would be happy in the Garden 
of Epicurus, he must cultivate the garden, although not 
in the blind, hopeless manner indicated by Voltaire's 
Candide. 

The functional ideal of happiness as an argument for 
life as something active, finds further approval in indi- 
vidualistic circles, when it is pointed out that such a 
conception, because it emphasizes the employment of 
conscious, creative faculties, is essentially interior. The 
ego works from within, whence follows the joy of life. 
Functioning, if we may continue to use such a doubtful 
term, suggests, not only the idea of acting from some- 
thing interior and therefore precious in life, but none 
the less the thought of work as a means of self-expres- 
sion, from which individualism may deduce its supreme, 
" I do." The end of life, as this idea has been brooding 
over all our considerations, is none other than self-exist- 
ence and self-expression : without culture, one cannot 
be said to exist within; without work, he can find no 
means of realizing the purpose of his being as self- 
expression. It was at this point that Huysmans' Des 
Esseintes singularly failed. Indeed, one might thrust 
that reproach even farther back into the history of 
Decadence and Romanticism, and thus condemn the 
Ironie of Schlegel and the Melancholie of Baudelaire by 
pointing out that these unhappy, if not ridiculous, con- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 451 

sequences of their individualism were due to the want 
of the activistic ideal. 

In the midst of this admission that activity is just 
and wise, we must keep asking whether and to what 
degree activity has the power and the authority to ex- 
press the self-existence of the individual. We verily 
know that labor as now conceived and conducted does 
not minister to the joy of life, but it may be possible 
to frame a conception of work which shall escape the 
consequences of industrialism. Our industrial condition 
is such that we must say with Balzac, in Beatrix, " We 
have products nowadays ; we no longer have works." 
Man is happy, that is in some degree, when he does that 
which is essentially in him to do ; he is unhappy, although 
not irredeemably so, when he cannot discover in which 
direction his lines of activity should extend, or when 
he is prevented from pursuing the course which his 
tastes and abilities dictate for him. The individual, we 
have said, must work from within; only such interior- 
ized activity can avail in the attainment of that happi- 
ness which is situated at the remote goal of life. But, 
where there is little in the way of inwardness, when the 
maximum of activity quickly exhausts the minimum of 
internal possession, the hope of achieving happiness 
through work, is deferred and denied. 

Where work is carried on, not freely, but in con- 
nection with industrial organization, the opportunity for 
self-expression is reduced to a mere shadow. That 
which calls forth activity in the work is no internal 
sense of a vocation, but an external complusion which 
tends to strangle happiness at the moment of its birth. 
Moreover, the conduct of such industrial activity, far 
from supplying satisfaction in the very performance of 
labor, has no other effect than stupefying the worker 
into a state of dullness in which the desire for happiness 
is driven down into the unconscious. The goal is like- 



45 2 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



wise no interior sense of self-realization, but consists of 
that sad external thing we call pay or reward. No 
energistic eudaemonism, whether that of Aristotle or 
Goethe, can give satisfactory account of the activities 
of men, as these exert and exhaust themselves in the 
productions of such an age as our own. Even if we 
admit that, as a form of production, industrialism has 
succeeded in solving a practical problem - — • an admis- 
sion which is far from the truth — we are still in a 
position where we must agree that the spiritual cost has 
involved a debt which the satisfactions of our modern 
life can never hope to repay. 

Work, then, as a means of self-expression and self- 
realization, is in no wise identifiable with the industrial 
activity which yields our mechanical products. Its effect 
has been, and always must be, to exteriorize the worker 
to such a degree that he will live and act external to 
himself; the worker cannot be one with his own inner 
self, nor can he give expression to that self; he is one 
thing, his work another. Ye are not your own, says the 
Apostle ; when we accept his statement as though he 
would say that each individual really belongs and is 
indebted to the spiritual world-order, we do not hide 
the lamentable fact that in another sense the individual 
belongs to an order of life, not superior and inviting, 
but inferior and repulsive. Each individual belongs to 
himself and to the spiritual order which contains the 
truth and worth of his inner life, so that any attempt to 
sever him from his own being and thus exteriorize his 
life is false and cruel. There is an ideal of joy in work, 
but it is one which industrialism has failed to realize. 

(2) The Characteristic Element in Work 

That the individual should have character seems even 
more obvious a proposition than the foregoing one to 
the effect that the individual should have joy in life; 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 453 

for this reason, individualism must seek to adjust itself 
to the ethical as well as to the eudaemonistic. Now the 
laboring class seems to be as far removed from char- 
acter as from enjoyment; the toiler is neither joyful 
nor virtuous. At this point, individualism insists that 
we define " character " in such an inclusive manner as 
to make room for what we have just called the " char- 
acteristic " ; we may affirm the former without negating 
the latter, without allowing the ethical to absorb the 
individualistic. When this distinction has once been 
made, it will be possible to inquire whether activity is 
calculated to evoke and express that which is within 
man; first, however, we must be careful to define the 
characteristic within its moralic limitations. 

The subjugation of the individual under the moralic 
ideal is not to be criticized rashly, yet we need not fear 
to point out that such a moralization of the human soul 
leaves much to be desired in the way of genuine living. 
In its essence, the moral law is akin to the physical 
principle of necessity in that it stands for that which 
is inevitable in human life. The function of morality 
is to compel action, as also to restrain natural impulses 
which are expected to exhaust themselves within the 
fixed circle of the obligatory. For this reason, we are 
led to doubt whether moralism is capable of sustaining 
the idea of work, without which the individual cannot 
express the meaning of his inner life; moralism leads to 
action, individualism to work. Between the moral act 
and the individualistic deed there is a difference which 
cannot be overcome by any extension of the moralic 
idea, while there is in the individualistic deed a peculiar 
spontaneity which cannot find expression in moral obli- 
gation. For the individual to seek self-expression in 
morality would be but cultivating the desert, where there 
would be plenty of action, but no fruitful work. 

When the moralistic and humanistic are further com- 



454 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



pared, it appears that the worker as moralist is forced 
to content himself with the exercise and elaboration of 
such virtues as are not calculated to bring out the best 
and most characteristic within him. Plato was honest 
enough to limit the virtue of the artisan to that of tem- 
perance, reserving courage for the warrior, wisdom for 
the philosopher ; at the same time, Plato alloted to the 
man in the highest station, not merely his characteristic 
virtue, but the exercise of the two lower functions as 
well. But where the morale concerns the worker, it is 
not so easy to attribute to him any participation in the 
higher virtues ; for he is expected to be himself, and 
realize himself, upon the basis of his proper virtue, and 
that alone. Platonic temperance, which was equivalent 
to self-mastery, was impotent to produce any such sense 
of self-existence and self-expression as individualism 
demands of the ego; in modern life, where the class- 
idea is by no means so formal and artistic as it was 
with Plato, somewhat the same may be said. The vir- 
tues which the life of labor arouses are not such as 
permit the expression of the self in work; for can man 
be himself when he is only temperate, industrious, and 
faithful? Selfhood is formed of more noble stuff than 
temperance and industry; so that the worker, if he be 
bent upon discovering and displaying his personality, 
must transcend the moralic principles inherent in his 
work. 

The elaboration of the " characteristic " in the indi- 
vidual demands something more than the moralistic; it 
demands the humanistic; that is, the interior life of 
man conceived in its totality, expressed in its integrity. 
The trans-moralic conception of character has not failed 
to find expression in the more recent philosophy of life, 
where it concerns itself less with the special acts per- 
formed by man and more with the general source of his 
activity as a whole. Pre-eminent among those who have 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 455 

sought character for man stands Eucken, whose Der 
Kampf um einen Geistigen Lebensinhalt reveals the 
modern struggle on the part of idealism in its attempt 
to establish, not only the independence, but also the 
character of spiritual life. 1 It is in this spirit that one 
may speak of both the essence and the character of 
religion, just as it is that in this manner the individual 
is to be understood as having an independent life and 
an intrinsic character. This character is not of his own 
making, but consists of the essential and intrinsic quali- 
ties which as man he possesses ; so that the problem of 
work, instead of concerning itself with nothing but the 
traits of individual, moral character as expressed through 
special virtues, has to do with the characteristic of man 
as human. Now science and social thinking have en- 
tered into a conspiracy to silence, if not to efface, this 
precious element of character; so that it may be said 
of the worker, not merely that he lacks morality, but 
that he is wanting in " character " ; that is, he does not 
display in his labor that which is in him, does not do 
that which is in him to do. 

It is at this point that individualism takes up the 
question of the " dignity of labor." Individualism de- 
nies the truth and worth of the idea thus expressed, 
because individualism cannot believe that work, as now 
understood and now performed, is capable of producing 
the characteristic in man. The truth of work was found 
to consist in the creative and intelligible; and where, as 
is now the case, work is mechanical and blind, it cannot 
be said to possess either truth or worth. Where work, 
as conceived in theory, consists in a reaction upon nature, 
as in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and the like, 
it does not fail to suggest dignity, or truth, or worth; 
but the industrial method of production fails to adjust 
the individual worker to his task, in that it does not 

J Op. cit., 96-212. 



456 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

permit him to realize what he is doing. Man may need 
to act, but just as surely does he need to know why he 
is acting, and what he is doing. It is, then, the lack of 
intelligence which spoils in fact that which appears so 
fair in theory, while it is the lack of intelligence which 
prevents the worker from acquiring the dignity and 
character which, under other circumstances, might well 
be his. Because of his want of comprehension, the 
worker fails to participate in his work ; hence the oppor- 
tunity for character is lost to him. 

In still another sense does work lack worth; that is 
when it assumes the subtle form of a " working for 
others." The eighteenth-century ideal of benevolence 
and the nineteenth-century notion of utility have con- 
spired to take work completely out of the hands of the 
worker, while the general spirit of altruism has further 
made forbidding the ideal of doing one's own work. 
It would sound at once strange and strident were we to 
assert that egoism is more worthy than altruism; and 
he who should dare to make such an affirmation would 
stand in danger of bringing down upon his head all the 
moralic wrath of four centuries of intense, earnest moral 
thinking. But, whatever may be true and right in the 
abstract condition of mankind, it can hardly be denied 
that, to-day, the more sensible, the more worthy ideal 
is that of living for one's self. Altruism is usually 
understood to mean a kind of free, self-conscious, and 
heart-felt act whereby the individual seeks not his own, 
but yields to the necessity of others. But there is 
another more real and more general form of altruism 
which has its seat in the unconscious and involuntary 
region of the mind, and from this inferior altruism has 
sprung the manifold industry of modern times. As a 
result of this more subtle spring of action, the vast 
majority of men are to-day living and working, not for 
themselves, but for others whom they will never know. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 457 

Individualism finds it necessary to oppose this kind 
of work for no other reason than that, in two distinct 
ways, it forces the human self to live exterior to his 
own being. Owing to lack of intelligence, the individual 
worker is forced to carry on an exteriorizing form of 
activity when he sets himself to the subduing of things 
of nature whose meaning is not known to him. Again, 
the individual is exteriorized and rendered alien to him- 
self when he is compelled to work for others. Now 
man should work from within ; to do this, he must have 
knowledge of the impulses which proceed from his will, 
and not work in a mechanical fashion with routine 
taking the place of spontaneity; and man should further 
work from within and thus produce that which has a 
value for his own life. Those who construct fine houses 
do not dwell within them ; and those who till the fields 
do not enjoy their fruits. Individualism now insists 
that such an exteriorization, however necessary it may 
be shown to be as a matter of fact, can never be worthy, 
so that there is no use in striving to be optimistic about 
it. The recognition of the ill may freely be made, even 
when one can suggest no remedy; hence, individualism 
says, " Life is false and in vain." 

In spite of this undeniable pessimism, individualism 
does not go to the extreme of asserting that all work 
is so lacking in creative intelligence and joyous char- 
acter that work has no truth or worth whatsoever. 
Individualism realizes that, if not with the artisan, then 
with the artist, genuine work may be and has been done. 
Without the faintest suggestion of utilitarian altruism, 
the artist has ever done worthy work, just as he has 
ministered unto the interests of mankind in general. 
The work of the artist, which seems to be the most 
superior type of human action, has ever been an interior- 
izing one, since the artist has worked from within in 
the perfection of that which could be called his own 



458 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

work. When art is compared with industry, it may be 
said that, if it be moralistically wrong for man to work 
in such a way that his product does not extend beyond 
the selfish borders of his own being, it is humanistically 
wrong for man to work in such a manner as forbids 
him to create from within and produce his own work. 
It is sad to think that man has no work to offer for the 
service of others; it is equally sad to consider that man 
has no work of his own. The lesson that cannot fail to 
impress itself upon the mind is that, under the present 
auspices of labor, the supreme duty of man is to have 
and to do a work of his own. 

II. THE CHARACTER OF WORLD-WORK 

Where the individual responds to the demand for a 
higher synthesis in the realm of activity, it remains to 
be seen whether the idea of activity in the exterior order 
is capable of the same elevation. If the individual rose 
above his anti-natural immoralism and set before him- 
self the ideal of creative, characteristic work, may some- 
thing similar be expected of the world in which this 
work is to be done? Unless this can be done, unless 
the world can be construed as the true place of human 
work, the question of life's worth can be met with 
nothing better than the old doubt and denial. Individ- 
ualism, in its desire to come to a new understanding 
with the world, does not desire to indulge the blandly 
anthropic notion that the physical order exists for the 
purpose of gratifying man's desires or of occupying his 
private energies ; at the same time, individualism is suffi- 
ciently loyal to the general principles of humanism to 
insist that the world must be viewed as the place, not 
only where things exist, but where human beings ex- 
press themselves. With all its alleged naturalism, mod- 
ern thought has not been willing to ignore the claims of 
humanity; whence the physical ideals of the Enlighten- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 459 

ment promptly led to definite political principles, while 
the biological conceptions of the nineteenth century were 
often framed with the ulterior purpose of making them 
the foundation of a socialized view of man's life. If 
the exterior seems to respond to the idea that man is a 
political animal or a social being, will it not be just as 
indulgent with the notion that man is an individualized 
creature who strives to place values upon things ? Under 
what circumstances, then, may the individual perform 
his work in the world of things? The answer to this 
categorical question is, " Freedom " : man can work 
only when he is free, creatively free. The will is not 
a kite which is raised and held in by a cord, but a bird 
self-propelled and self-directed. 

1. The; Freedom of Work 

Libertarianism calls upon the individual to be satisfied 
in the mere willing of his volitions ; individualism, how- 
ever, feels that the self is in a position to will the world. 
But how does determinism help the individualist when 
he attempts to advance his ideal of universal volition? 
Determinism, when critically entertained and expressed, 
does not remove volition from the individual, but seeks 
to include the volition within a circle of activity beyond 
the control of the will. According to determinism, man 
must will, and he must will that which is necessary; his 
freedom must submit to fate, liberty to law. From the 
libertarian point of view, this is fatal to freedom, but 
the individualist's conception of the will is so much 
vaster that the overtures of determinism seem quite in- 
viting. If man must will, if that which he must will 
is the necessary, then his act of volition wills the world. 
Moreover, if the character of the world is such as that 
man can and must will it, then we know more of the 
exterior order and are able to press farther into its 
mysteries than were possible under the auspices of liber- 



460 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

tarianism. It is only man to whom determinism pre- 
sents a problem; the beast, which obviously is deter- 
mined, can complain of no hardship. At the same time, 
it is only to the free will that determinism offers com- 
petition, while it is conceivable that there is a concep- 
tion of activity which shall synthesize the two opposed 
points of view. Augustine united voluntarism and the 
doctrine of pre-destination ; Spinoza found intellectual 
freedom in the midst of a complete determinism ; Fichte 
united freedom and absolutism ; Schopenhauer connected 
both natural force and individual freedom in the one 
will-to-live. 

The individualistic view of creative work, whereby 
man wills the world, assumes responsibilities far greater 
than those of a libertarianism, which is content to place 
the individual upon an independent foundation. Indi- 
vidualism has an anxiety more profound than that which 
consists in conceiving of the individual in such a manner 
that he may will himself; individualism is desirous of 
having the self will the world also, for which reason it 
clings to determinism, even when such an affiliation may 
seem dangerous. Determinism, instead of closing up 
the world against the human self, opens a door through 
which the self may enter the world, and participate in 
its operations ; but does that door swing both ways ? 
Is there, perhaps, some exchange, so that as the world 
gains in the obedience of the individual to its laws, the 
individual himself is a gainer in the transaction? 

Such questions, perplexing if not profound as they 
are, leave the idea of the world undefined, or with no 
definition save that of force. Yet there is more to the 
world than a system of forces, while the complete mind 
of man experiences something more than the sense of 
necessity which, according to determinism, is laid upon 
him. From the aesthetic standpoint, the world is the 
scene of joys; and it is by means of aesthetic partici- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 461 

pation in the world that human enjoyment comes. The 
senses stretch out toward the world of sense only to 
find satisfaction and nourishment. Then, likewise, the 
world is a system of truths; and, when the intellect 
investigates the essential forms of that which is given 
in experience, it is not disappointed, but comes back 
refreshed with the vision of knowledge and the answer 
to its questions. When we raise the question concern- 
ing the operations of the will, we find that, instead of 
willing an act for the sake of the volition therein in- 
volved, the activities of man go forth from the self in 
the quest for values. Now, if the world present itself 
to the mind as a world of joys and truths, is it not 
presumable that it is further able to gratify the will 
by supplying it with the values demanded? Nature 
may still possess its stark dynamic form of a world of 
forces, just as in the instances of the aesthetical and 
logical it may assume a character which does not always 
yield the joys and the truths which the mind seeks ; but 
it cannot be wholly indifferent to the search for value 
which is characteristic of the will's activities. 

To assure himself that his will has a work in the 
world, the individual has only to raise the question con- 
cerning the manifest purpose of his will. To the senses 
is the command given, " Get joy out of the world " ; 
to the intellect, " Get truth." Now, to the will the com- 
mandment is, " Get value out of the world." For this 
value, not for the mere sake of willing, does man act; 
for this he carries on the ceaseless striving of the will; 
and, unless one assume the standpoint of extreme pas- 
sivistic pessimism, it is fair to assume that the indi- 
vidual has been as successful in obtaining the values of 
the will as he has been in securing the peculiar satis- 
factions of the senses and the intellect. In some ways, 
the conduct of the will in getting value from the world 
is more convincing than the behavior of the senses and 



462 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the intellect. With the latter, the mind functions in a 
manner almost altogether receptive; with joy and truth, 
practically all that the individual can do is to prepare 
a place for them, and give them due recognition; but, 
with the will in its inherent activities, there is a definite 
sense in which the individual creates the values which 
he seeks to obtain from the world. The world contains 
the possibility of worths ; the realization of them, how- 
ever, is due to the will. 

Because of the volitional character of values, the 
belief in worth depends almost wholly upon the strength 
of the will ; as a result, it is not really determinism but 
pessimism which tends to make the will appear to be 
wanting in freedom. Such is the situation presented in 
the modern drama, standing out as it does in striking 
contrast to Greek tragedy. With Sophocles, man was 
unable to possess the world because his will was presided 
over by the principle of blind fate, whereby the work 
of an CEdipus was forever in vain, while the attempt to 
secure knowledge could only end in disaster. Like the 
Prometheus of ^Eschylus, the CEdipus of Sophocles was 
strong and daring in will, but blind fate turned knowl- 
edge and activity to catastrophe. Indeed, one can even 
revert to the Homeric life-ideal where intense activism 
and nobility of character seemed to avail nought in the 
blind strife of forces in the world. With the Romantic 
drama, however, the world is conceived as inimical to 
man; the fault is within man himself. Thus it is not 
that the world, stupendous as the idea of it may seem, 
is too great for man, but that his will is not strong 
enough for its task; such is the manifest cause of our 
passivistic pessimism. 

Why was it that Ibsen's Julian failed? Was it not 
because he did not have the superman's strength to 
" will himself " ? In that world-drama, Ibsen seems to 
mask the pessimism due to the will's weakness by an 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 463 

inappropriate principle of determinism, so that, as the 
" freed-man under necessity," the hero must will what 
he has to will, 2 just as his downfall was attributed to 
the fact that " the world-will had laid an ambush for 
him." 3 Yet the cause which lay deeper and nearer the 
heart of the matter appears in Julian's inability to un- 
derstand the meaning of the Third Empire which he 
sought to will into existence. Informed by his master 
that " the world-will had resigned its power into his 
hands," 4 Julian confesses his weakness, complains of 
nostalgia, while it is only in a feeble, feverish voice that 
he shouts, " The Third Empire is at hand." 5 With 
Julian, to will was to will, not merely to have to will ; 
and, in his inability intelligently and intensely to pursue 
his volitions, he is called upon to suffer defeat. 

Wagner's Wotan, like Julian impressed with the pos- 
sibility of a futuristic social state peopled with self- 
willing, fearless heroes, furnishes even a better example 
of the pessimism which springs from the inner feeling 
of weakness rather than the idea of external necessity; 
for, in the case of Wotan, the god, who was pictured 
as possessing inherent power over all law, the only 
impediment to the expression of will lay within the soul 
itself. In Rheingold, the god cannot solve his economic 
problems, nor can he command sufficient power of will 
to realize his desires, whence he encounters his first 
defeat. In Walkiire, where his power dwindles to 
naught, the complexities of the ethical arrangement so 
puzzle his mind, and the needs of the new moral situ- 
ation so exhaust his will, that he is forced to confess 
his god's plight as one in which he is " the least free 
of all." 6 Here, there is no classical suggestion of a 
nameless law over-ruling the volitions of mankind ; 
rather is it pointed out that when, as in the character 

a Op. cit., Act III, Sc. III. « lb., Pt. II, Act V, Sc. IV. 

*Ib., Act V, Sc. I. s Ib., Sc. II. a Op. cit., Act II, Sc. II. 



464 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of Wotan, man comes to the highest pitch of human 
development, he suffers from the feebleness of his own 
will. To redeem the situation, it is not said that there 
must be less fate; on the contrary, it is declared that 
the work of man in the world is to be carried on by 
one who is freer than the free, der freier als der Gott. 1 
The weakness and blindness of the will are to be 
overcome ethically by summoning strong motives and 
elaborating worthy goals; in the endeavor to will the 
world, the individual can be aided by a view of the 
inherent possibilities of the will. Like the intellect, the 
will has the power to gain possession of the world; 
for, as there is a connection between thinking and being, 
there is none the less a bond between willing and being. 
The will to reality is the means by which the individual 
comes into possession of his world; this appears in con- 
nection with the idea of time. The world, instead of 
being a fixed system made up of a solid reality, is made 
up of an ever changing manifold, so that, on the surface 
of it at least, the world is a perpetual flux. As the 
perceiving, conceiving intellect insinuates itself among 
these many changing things, so the will finds it possible 
to penetrate into the changing order, there to work out 
its own ends. Without the work of the will, the fleet- 
ing impulse will rule man when it is possible for man 
to rule it ; but when the will is applied to the changing 
object, the latter becomes fixed, a permanent value 
organized if not created by the will. The action of the 
will is both introvertive and extrovertive ; by means of 
attention, the object becomes fixed as idea, while the 
exteriorizing work of the will has the effect of bringing 
the object under the sway of the individual with his 
volition. 

The will to realize, whereby values are created in the 
world, finds its expression in the work of man in the 

''lb., Act in, Sc. in. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOLE 465 

world, as this appears in his art and religion. In vain 
have the phenomena of the world sought to sweep by- 
man unnoticed, unaffected; man has seized them to 
raise them above the flux and render them eternal and 
spiritual. The elusive qualities of beauty and sanctity 
have been subordinated to the power of the human will. 
If the essence of things has not been changed by the 
work of the will, their character has been transformed 
in such a substantial manner as to substitute for the 
sensuous the spiritual, for the changing the permanent, 
whence the individual has been able to come into pos- 
session of his world. By means of such a dialectic of 
will, it becomes possible to escape from decadence with 
its noble despair; for the will has some other than an 
individual object. Man will will more than himself. 
It is the fate of the will to issue forth from the privacy 
of personal life to take up and effect a genuine work 
in the world. 

Where activity is conceived of, neither as mere action 
nor as sheer inaction, but as creative work, the essential 
ground of that work is not far to seek. The intellectual 
view of the world, which construed knowledge as a con- 
crete, active life, its object as a world of phenomena 
and causes, found it possible to afford the ego a real 
participation in the world- whole. If the will is equally 
intelligible in its operations, it should reveal the fact 
that, as there is a genuine ground for action, so by 
action the self may come into possession of the world. 
In the first instance, where the object of knowledge was 
the question at hand, individualism found it both pos- 
sible and expedient to effect a temporary departure from 
the Parmenidean principle of permanence, in order that 
the intellect might have the benefit of change, as this 
was promised by the Heraclitean dialectic. How, now, 
will the case stand, when it is no longer the intellect 
seeking knowledge, but the will anxious for world-work 



466 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

which engages our attention? We have no desire to 
indulge in paradox; but as the usual promises of Par- 
menides, as understood by Plato, were found unsatis- 
factory to human knowledge, so the activistic assurances 
of the Heraclitean philosophic will be found to disap- 
point the self in its desire to take hold of the world. 

The apparent value of the Heraclitean, as compared 
with the Parmenidean, consists in this : the will is an 
active restless function of the human mind; hence it 
cannot accept the Parmenidean idea of a fixed and 
finished world, since such a conception would forbid the 
notion of work. On the other hand, the Heraclitean 
world, with its underlying activism and its ceaseless 
changes, would seem to be the very place for the indi- 
vidual to thrust his will into the world. But Heraclitus, 
who was not himself convinced of the impossibility of 
knowing the flowing world, seems to have had the feel- 
ing that that world was no place for action, for in the 
stream of reality one could hope to bathe but once. 8 
When one complains that the world of Parmenides is 
too fixed and perfect, the world of Heraclitus was too 
fluid and eternally imperfect for the world-work of the 
human will. 

To turn to Parmenides, and expect his substantialism 
to supply the will with a principle of action, seems at 
once impossible and in vain, although much will depend 
upon the manner in which the estin einai is interpreted. 
If the being which is, has about it a solid nature, then 
the will cannot hope to effect changes in its character; 
if it be so perfect that the intellect cannot suggest 
changes, the volitional effort is hopeless. But suppose 
that the substantiality, which with Parmenides had no 
very definite determination, stand for little more than 
consistency of being; will not the powers of volition 
approach it with confidence, in the knowledge that work 

8 Fragments, O. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 467 

can be done in such a medium as this, ruled as it is by 
a principle? The ever-yielding content of the flux for- 
bade action, but the moulding of that which is formed 
according to reason need imply no such impossibilities. 
Furthermore, the perfection of the Parmenidean sub- 
stance was a formal one only, so that something by way 
of work may be accomplished with the undetermined 
content. 

The despair which the individualist felt when he was 
confronted by the system of substantialism was due, in 
part, to his failure to appreciate the depth of the causal 
principle. To the activist, the free causality of causa 
transiens seems to offer promises unknown in the king- 
dom of causa immanens, so that thinkers of the Par- 
menidean and Spinozistic type usually relapse into de- 
terminism. Again, we must revert to the case of 
Heraclitus, and thus reassure ourselves that a world of 
flux has in it nothing for the will, for the freedom of 
the world forbids the freedom of the will. Transient 
causality, as this expresses itself in a Heraclitean world, 
fails to explain that which actually occurs when one 
thing exerts an influence over another. All that the 
theory of transient causality can do is to prepare the 
way for a more consistent conception of the interaction 
among the things which make up the world. When, 
then, every supposed case of transient action is really 
an example of immanent action, the way for work in 
general is prepared. Now, all that the human will can 
ask is a share in the august work which the world seems 
to be carrying on ; for the will to possess an extra power 
of action would hardly be in keeping with the ways of 
the world-whole, for freedom seems to consist of a 
putting of the will into the world, rather than an oppo- 
sition of the will to the world. 

The substantial world, whose qualitative and causal 
nature forbids that it should be rigid in its rational 



no 



468 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

behavior, seems then to promise the will that, when 
work is attempted, it shall be done; for one may enter 
the world once, twice, thrice, and so on indefinitely and 
find it displaying the same principle of being and action. 
Under such auspices, world-work may be taken up and 
done by the human will; were the world a mere flux, 
there would be activity, but no work, for work consists, 
not merely in movement, but in the realization of results. 
Where the will proceeds in a temporalistic manner, it 
stands in need of the opportunity to eternalize the object 
of its effort ; this eternalizing may assume the rigoristic 
form of the Categorical Imperative, which we here cite 
for metaphysical rather than for moralistic purposes, 
or it may express itself in the more liberal forms in 
which human volition has learned to idealize its im- 
pulses. 

With a fleeting world, there would be no opportunity 
for the will to create its characteristic values, without 
which the work of the will were in vain. Now the 
achievement of the worth of life, which was impossible 
with the subjective form of individualism, and which 
expressed itself in Ironie and an empty Will-to-selfhood, 
becomes possible when the will finds it possible to affirm 
the reality of the objective order. In a world of flux, 
where reality would slip through the fingers, no creation 
of values would be possible; for a world which has 
nothing fixed about it is incapable of providing the will 
the opportunity to fixate the values which appear to 
the individual as desirable. Were one, in the spirit of 
dialectical disinterestedness, to compare the degree of 
activism which has entered respectively into idealistic 
and realistic systems, one would find oneself confronted 
by the paradox that, while idealism seems to promise 
nothing in the way of work, except perhaps a fine 
Aristotelian " energy of contemplation," it has been 
under the auspices of idealism that the work of worth 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 469 

has been accomplished. On the other hand, a survey 
of the world of realism, with its apparent possibility of 
subduing the soft, mobile elements of human experience, 
presents no such picture of moral endeavor. Perhaps 
the idealist has never been able to explain how he would 
reconcile his principle of activity with his belief in the 
fixed, finished character of his world, or the realist offer 
sufficient apology for his slothfulness in a world as 
promising as that of empirical thought. But, according 
to the foregoing reasoning, it is the firm, consistent 
character of the ideal world which assures the worker 
of the realization of his values, while it is the fluid, 
fleeting world which warns the realist not to attempt 
anything essential in the way of work. 

Whether this particular line of reasoning be convinc- 
ing or not, the fact remains that, in the history of ethics, 
the great moral systems have sprung from the idealistic 
views of the world in which the absolutistic would seem 
to forbid the activistic. But this latter has not been the 
case; one might even say that the more the understand- 
ing is convinced of the permanence of the forms of the 
world, the more intense has been the vigor with which 
the life-ideal has been made an object of volition. With 
no thinker before Socrates, whether he was static or 
dynamic in his style of thinking, do we find the ethical 
impulse; but, with the coming of intellectualistic sub- 
stantialism, as in the case of Plato, the intellectual per- 
suasion of the permanence of the world is accompanied 
by the active pursuit of the good as an object of striving. 
With Plato, the Idea assumed a dual form: here it was 
a universal whose reality was assured to the intellect; 
there it was a goal, or ideal, which made its due impres- 
sion upon the will. The same may be said of Kant: 
convinced of the a priori certainty of causality as one 
of the fixed forms of the understanding, who was more 
insistent than he upon the abject volition of duty? 



47° 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Kant finds it possible to divide the complete object of 
the whole reason when he relegates causality to the 
phenomenal world, freedom to the noumenal order; but 
even here he evinces most emphatically the possibility 
of volition in the midst of absolutism, since it is indeed 
the noumenal which is to be willed. 

With an avowedly static system, like that of Spinoza, 
the belief in absolutism, far from prohibiting action, 
seems to be the very basis upon which that action is 
grounded. As Geulincx had premised a nihil-valeo-nihil 
volo as the basis of the speculative part of his ethics, 
only to lay down upon that basis an activistic concep- 
tion of the actual life of man, so Spinoza finds it pos- 
sible to introduce action into the sphere of substantial- 
ism, while his ideal of acquiescence comes as the con- 
clusion, not as the premise, of his ethical philosophy. 
On the other hand, a voluntaristic system, like Schopen- 
hauer's, may ascribe to the will the endless possibility 
of willing, and yet, as was the case with Schopenhauer, 
may conclude that the application of perfect activity 
will be wholly in vain. It is from the idealist, who 
might be thought to have nothing for action in his sys- 
tem, that constructive ethical thinking has ever been 
forthcoming; realism, which might easily assume that, 
if there are to be ideals, they must be created by man 
himself, has been strangely impotent to produce moral 
motives or to fix moral standards. The fixed world 
may make the creation of ideals seem difficult, but the 
fluid world makes this impossible. 

2. The Value op Work 

If the individual as worker looks to nature to give 
the terminus a quo of work, he cannot help expecting 
the humanistic order to supply its terminus ad quern. 
Where the human will is surveyed in the light of liber- 
tarian freedom, all that it asks of nature is the oppor- 



WORTH OF IJFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 471 

tunity for movement, all that it demands of humanity 
is the privilege of action ; but mere movement and sheer 
action are principles far removed from the explanation 
of what humanity has actually effected in the world, 
whence the individualist resorts to the superior ideals 
of work as that which is constructively free and prac- 
tically creative. The kind of individual which this con- 
ception of freedom has in mind is not so much man in 
general with his indefinite moral ambitions to do this or 
that, but man as worker with his desire to create some- 
thing in his own image. To this notion, nature, herself 
creative, is not really inimical ; what shall be thought 
of the social order? Does the social order with its 
works make room for the creative individualist who 
desires both to do and to know what he is doing? 

The individual as worker is in a position directly the 
contrary of the individual as thinker ; where the man of 
culture seeks to return to the world of things and per- 
sons, the man of conquest endeavors to extricate him- 
self from these. Where the intellectualist desires to 
cast a shadow, the individual as worker longs to kindle 
a flame. The man of culture is not wanting in energy, 
but his is the energy of contemplation; the man of 
action has light, but the light that is in him may be 
darkness. Thus, it is seen that, if the man of culture 
is, as it were, hopelessly removed from the world of 
men, the man of action is as hopelessly submerged in 
the same human mass; half-brothers as they are, the 
worker is the child of bond-woman, the thinker, the 
child of the free. The individual perfects his interior 
culture, but finds himself strangely removed from the 
living issues of mankind ; the active man performs his 
work, only to find himself entangled in the machinery of 
industrial life ; for this reason, the problem of life, which 
consists in relating the ego to humanity and humanity 
to the ego, now has to do with the adjustment of the 



472 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



social order to the submerged individual who is so 
placed that he cannot live his own life, do his own work. 
In contrast with this problem of individualizing indus- 
trialism, the older problem of socializing the individual 
sinks into comparative indifference. 

The conditions of humanity are such that the problem 
of being one's self is easily paramount. Science has seized 
the intellect and now dictates the special soul-states to 
which the ego shall give credence; society has laid hold 
of the will, and commands the individual to express 
only such impulses as have a utilitarian significance. 
But, with the return of individualism and the retreat 
of the scientific and the social, there appears a hope that 
man may be himself and do his work. How shall one 
pass from industry to individuality? It is quite evident 
that individuality is not to come by means of any nega- 
tion of work; one may seek superiority but he cannot 
disclaim allegiance to action ; he may not be " super- 
fluous " lest he be fatally idle ; he cannot safely or wisely 
release his soul by means of crime; he must seek his 
salvation in the very midst of his work. Yet, in all this, 
it must not be forgotten that it is the primary need and 
duty of the laboring man to extricate himself from the 
industrial life which now claims him. 

In the study of work, the lesson of Faust is one which 
we need not to learn, as it was also a principle omitted 
in the egoistic education of Goethe, its author. The 
individual whose salvation from care is so earnestly 
sought by his author and himself was first allowed to 
enjoy the benefits of the contemplative life, so that his 
unwonted occupation in the swamp may be looked upon 
as a sort of vacation-activity whose contrast to the intro- 
activity of attention to ideas could only come as a relief. 
Suppose, now, we reverse the operation, and, instead of 
starting with the gifted personality who, having stolen 
the fire from heaven, seeks to complete his human career 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 473 

in the poorest operation of earth; will the conclusion 
be the same? Faust, it must be remembered, bent over 
his task in all the superiority of the man who knows 
what he is seeking and why he is working; in this he 
has the advantage over the man who begins with work, 
whose beginning is the deed, but who has no clear idea 
concerning the meaning of the life in which he is work- 
ing. As a result, we find our laboring man in a situ- 
ation exactly the opposite of Faust's. Our laboring 
man fails to find the all- vaunted joy in work because 
he does not know what it is all about. Faust was not 
forced to his task by the need of bread; while the real 
Faust of our economic era works, not for the work's 
sake, still less for the happiness which work is supposed 
to yield, but for the solid purpose of existing. Thus it 
may be that not the deed but the thought is to become 
the means of his salvation. 

In considering the life-problem which the times thrust 
upon us, we should observe how likely it may be for 
the worker to desire some of the thought-life which the 
intellectual like Goethe has so rashly cast aside. He 
who works in swamp and factory, not convinced that 
the activity of the will contains the key to his salvation, 
may be found longing to seize the fire which Y^schylus 
and Goethe fear to point out to the intellect. Are we 
not learning from Socialism that man may be seeking a 
place in the sun? Those who advise the life of imper- 
sonal, unthinking activity, like Goethe's Faust and Bal- 
zac's Country Doctor, betray the imperfection of their 
argument when they preface their account of holy, help- 
ful activity by a recital of some metaphysical or moral 
wrong from which the intellectualist has been suffering; 
Faust had not handled the mind aright; Benassis had 
been equally at fault in dealing with the moral wilt. 
Hence, their retreat to degraded communities and their 
consolation in eleemosynary work does not present the 



474 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



normal life-situation, where sincere individualism in 
both thought and action is asked to decide between the 
respective merits and satisfactions of private and public 
existence. 

To the advanced Russian consciousness of a Gorky, 
we may turn to receive advices concerning the spiritual 
condition of the worker. Gorky's " children of the 
sun " are strangely innocent of the joys and glories of 
activity as the more refined Goethe endeavored to indi- 
cate. A picture of the laboring class in repose and 
reflection is afforded by his The Night Refuge, while 
a more complete philosophy, as also a more normal 
presentation of the life-situation, may be found in his 
Foma Gordyeeff. Gorky was not without knowledge of 
the Faust-idea, for the polished literature of Turgenieff 
had acted to exalt the activism which Goethe attempted 
to teach his contemporaries. Turgenieff, the first liter- 
ary nihilist, and one who had felt the necessity of set- 
tling accounts with the " black earth force," was ready 
to condemn as " superfluous men " the Hamlets of con- 
templation. 9 Now it is the submerged Hamletism in 
Gorky's people which makes them worthy of a hearing. 
Why do men really live? That is Gorky's cardinal 
question. Those who propound it have toiled with all 
intensity; they believe instinctively that there is truth 
in work, assert that " man was born to give birth to 
strength," but suffer from the fear that work will throw 
dust in the eyes of those who would see what they are 
doing. 

The situation to-day seems to be one in which work 
is not work; work as carried on is an occupation, an 
obvious means of living, while as work par excellence 
it is nothing. Industry and culture stand before man 
to whom they stretch out their hands : man accepts the 
offering of industry because it seems more direct, more 

9 Virgin Soil, tr. Hapgood, 109. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 475 

nearly obvious; the gifts of culture glitter in vain. In 
Gorky's Foma Gordyeeff, the hero's god-father says to 
Foma, " If a fool offers you honey, spit it out; if a wise 
man offers you poison, drink it." 10 The worker of the 
present has not hesitated to take the honey of industry; 
the apparent poison of culture he has refused. Like 
Goethe, Gorky believes that man has a work in the 
world, although he is by no means ready to accept the 
idea of the immediately useful task as though that were 
a human work. In his cynicism, Gorky agrees with 
Turgenieff in condemning detached men without duties ; 
" You can find a justification for everything on earth. 
But men, like cockroaches, are altogether superfluous 
on earth. Everything is for them, and what are they 
for ? " " The supreme task alloted to man, far from 
being a romantic flight from or a decadent denial of 
life, consists in " reducing life to order," in " organ- 
izing life," in " arranging life." Then, the individual 
may find his place ; and, when he feels his own value, 
life has no authority over him. This truth is expressed 
by individualism when it insists that, for the realization 
of life as that which has self -existence and self-expres- 
sion, there must be a higher synthesis than the scientific 
and the social have been able to offer. The man shall 
have both a place and a work. 

The failure to find one's place in life, a misfortune 
which has often been the cause of suicide in the gifted 
youth, represents one side of the situation, while it 
drives us back to the fundamental consideration con- 
cerning the meaning of human existence and the destiny 
of man. Where one believes in the greatness of man, 
he is dismayed at discovering how incapacitated to enter 
the world of persons is the man who has, for a time, 
given himself up to intellectual perfection. The human- 
ism which inspires the soul to realize itself in accord- 

10 Op. cit., tr. Hapgood, 126. u lb., 268. 



476 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ance with the best that is within him, is often at variance 
with the humanism that concerns itself with the living 
interests of mankind. To make oneself talented and 
intelligent is to make oneself useless; to make oneself 
useful is to deny the soul its right to inner perfection. 
The rich and poor in spirit alike are threatened with 
starvation; the man of genius who fails to find a " mar- 
ket for his wares " is one with the unskilled laborer who 
waits idle in the market-place. This situation is evi- 
dently due to the fact that the world of men is organized 
upon the basis of mediocrity, so that those who stand at 
the extremes feel the cold of opposed poles. Both are 
confronted with isolation, whence they are thrown in- 
ward upon themselves to feed upon their own hearts, 
while wisdom and ignorance place them upon the same 
footing. 

This superior problem of labor involves considera- 
tions peculiar to both man and his social environment. 
For the ego who is isolated from the social order, the 
problem consists in adapting inner life to exterior exist- 
ence; in the case of the submerged self, the question 
involves the relation of the outer world to interior life. 
At present, both must be viewed together. For the 
more complete analysis of the social situation of the 
man of genius and the genre character, it is necessary 
to indicate the manner in which intellect and will branch 
out from the original sensitivity of the soul. Our pres- 
ent-day psychology has enabled us to see how akin are 
these two leading phases of our mental life, where the 
older psychology was content to point out the differ- 
ences between them. We will not complicate the ques- 
tion by asking which is superior, the will or the intellect, 
but will seek to discover the particular effect which the 
employment of each has upon the spiritual condition of 
mankind. Those who rejoice in ideas, long for the 
expression of the self as this seems to come from the 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 477 

will; those who are given up to activity become envious 
of the individual who has the power to draw away from 
the world, its cares and tasks, and enjoy the inward 
picture of life which his imagination has framed for 
him. Both alike suffer from nostalgia, for where the 
intellectual man finds misery in his alienation from the 
world, the man of work is plagued by the feeling that 
he is separated from himself. Intellect makes all sub- 
jective; the will turns all to objectivity. 

The more particular curse of intellectualism appears 
when the ego discovers that his is a world of illusion, 
while the peril of the will lies in the latter's power to 
absorb inner existence and render the ego impersonal 
and automatic. Intellect deludes, where the will stu- 
pefies; in both instances, man misses the point in life. 
One type of life provides the self with mere form where 
the other yields nought but content. As a result of this, 
we find an intellectualistic age, like that of the Enlight- 
enment, counseling the individual to act, although it 
cannot be said that an activistic period is always pos- 
sessed of the wisdom which advises the ego to think. 
The present age is an example of the stupefying effect 
of labor; and where man has exaggerated the value of 
the " efficient life," instead of seeking relief in culture, 
he continues to praise the principle that has caused him 
his discontent. Thus it would appear as though intel- 
lectualism, with all of its possible excesses, is the wiser 
life-ideal, for the reason that, when it has come to the 
point of excess, it does not fail to indicate the predica- 
ment, does not shrink from providing the proper means 
of deliverance. 

Wisdom has ever warned the world against the exag- 
gerations of intellectual activity, so that man is always 
on guard against 'his ideals ; but the same world-wisdom 
has not indulged sufficient intellectual justice to warn 
man against the encroachments of work. Moreover, the 



478 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

intellectualist is in a mental condition of sensitivity 
whereby he learns that he suffers, while the activist is 
only dimly conscious of the ills which beset his poor 
soul. Where mankind in the mass suffers from a sur- 
plus of willing, it has not the power to discover the 
source of the affliction. For practical purposes, the 
world of men has always praised work, because work 
seemed to be essential, while thought was regarded as 
a luxury. As a result, one hesitates to advance an idea, 
even when it may lead to a more perfect comprehension 
of the meaning of life, lest one be told that one's idea 
is not " practical." At the same time, the activistic 
prophet has been led to believe that, not only is the will 
serviceable in a social manner, but the exercise of it is 
beneficial to the subject of willing. Those who know 
their Schopenhauer have long since learned that the 
effect of willing is far from having about it the benefits 
the voluntaristic advocate is so ready to ascribe. They 
have learned also how to trace the connection between 
voluntarism and pessimism, so that the advice, " Culti- 
vate the garden," is not accepted with credulity. The 
furious cultivation of the garden in America is the 
source of our national discontent. We have forgotten 
Emerson in our enthusiasm for Edison, and are now 
suffering from a disconcerted life-feeling. 

To what degree the individual may safely surrender 
himself to his work depends upon the ability to absorb 
his volitions, and this in turn involves the mysterious 
psychology of the will. Is the will friendly to the sub- 
ject of willing, or does it instill into our veins the poison 
of fatigue? Is it not from this fatigue of volition that 
our present-day ego suffers, and is it not with national 
voluntarism that we are now afflicted? The ability of 
a nation to endure and revive from the effects of war, 
as in the fine instance of the French in the last gen- 
eration, is greater than its power to endure the conflicts 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 479 

and sufferings of such an industrialism as that with 
which they are now burdening us. Both prosperity and 
poverty, finance and labor, present problems of volition 
which have grown beyond our power to solve. The age 
throws dust in the eyes, so that, in seeking the realiza- 
tion of life, we lose the consciousness of the life-pur- 
pose. Those who are the most energetic are those who 
have the least sufficient notion of what their energy is 
supposed to effect, while the plan of existence and the 
motive for striving are driven back into the unconscious 
by the stronger motives of action. As a result, we are 
forced to ask the question, " How long can man endure 
and act without a clear life-ideal ? " 

The psychology of this distressing situation involves 
that community of will and intellect upon which we 
have based the question activity and culture. Will and 
intellect, instead of belonging to separate phases of our 
soul-life, are expressions of one and the same process 
of mentality; the cognitive consciousness, which has 
dwindled to the minimum of life-intelligence, is only the 
other side of the volitional consciousness, which has so 
thoroughly exaggerated its importance in the life of 
humanity : consciousness and conduct are thus twin chil- 
dren of the one soul-life. That which arouses the will 
is an idea which acts as motive, while the conduct of 
the intellect is made possible by the same will intro- 
verted and acting in the character of attention. When 
the power of the will is almost completely taken up with 
action, the ability to attend to ideas as such is so crip- 
pled that we must act without thinking, must strive on- 
ward without conceiving or calculating the goal. Where 
genuine action is fitted to express ideas in volitions, and 
where sound thinking is benefited by the exercise of 
volitions, we have been so blind as to allow the volitional 
side of our life to submerge the ideational character of 
intelligent work. In America, we have thus built up a 



480 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

vast commercial civilization without a thought of its 
expediency or benefit. We have sought to settle with- 
out our host, and are now in a condition of national 
distrust and discontent. 

III. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS 

The foregoing analysis of the individual and the world 
has resulted in showing that the human self is more than 
a private, punctual ego, just as the world appears to be 
something more liberal than a Heraclitean system of 
aimless movements. Where the self and the natural 
order seem now to be on better terms than was formerly 
the case, a similar spirit of mutual understanding makes 
its presence felt in the social order; here, the individual 
as such is led to believe that his strivings mean some- 
thing more than merely industrial activity, so that the 
self may take its place in the social order as worker 
indeed. But the renewed analysis of both the world and 
the self has had no more effect than to indicate that the 
reunion of the self with the world is a possibility; how 
is this possibility to clothe itself in actuality? Already, 
we have been gratified in observing how the aesthetical 
consciousness makes possible an aesthetic synthesis of 
the self with both nature and humanity; now we must 
express the hope that the ethical consciousness of hu- 
manity will have a similar effect, whence the practical 
synthesis of the self and the world will be effected. 

i. The; Hsdonic Synthesis 

It must ever be borne in mind that modern thought, 
with its separation of thought and thing, of individual 
and society, has constantly tended to obscure the real 
issue of human life. Coming up out of the serious 
thinking of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth- 
century moralist sought the complete naturalization of 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 481 

man. Where nature worked upon animal instinct in 
such an imperious manner as to force upon the beast 
the congregative tendency, reason seemed to be working 
in a punctual manner to segregate individuals to a con- 
dition of solitariness. How the earnest moralist of that 
period strove to emulate the naturalistic ideal, as when 
Shaftesbury appealed to the herding system in nature, 
while Adam Smith sought to apply the synthetic prin- 
ciple of sympathy to the sons of men. Far different 
was the attitude of the individualistic immoralist of the 
nineteenth century: realizing that nature has, not too 
slender, but too strong a hold upon man, the immoralist 
repudiated the herding-principle, and sought to place the 
individual upon his own feet. The anti-naturalism of 
the later thinker thus stands out in glaring contrast to 
the pro-naturalism of the earlier one. 

(1) Naturalism and Nihilism 

Which was right, the moralist who aimed to establish 
a natural synthesis among men, or the immoralist who 
sought to neutralize the idea that nature subordinates 
man to the type, the specimen to the species? Was 
Hobbes just in his attempt to pass from the ego to the 
body politic, or did Stirner express the truth in the 
matter when he struggled to go from the State to the 
ego ? The practical synthesis, as this is now being taken 
up, contends that, if the individual is to be relegated to 
an order, it must be the individual indeed who is so rele- 
gated. Let nature exercise her subtle power and thus 
assemble specimens under the head of the species, and 
it does not follow that the natural synthesis will apply 
in the case of such a self-propelled, value-creating crea- 
ture as man. The moralist was right in insisting that 
there must be some kind of synthesis ; the immoralist 
was no less just in asserting that, whatever may be done 
to man, he must be viewed as though he were none other 



482 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN -LIFE 

than man. Now arises the question, if man is surveyed 
individualistically as one whose life has intrinsic worth, 
what kind of arrangement will adapt itself to the syn- 
thesis of individuals under some general head, as the 
State, or Society? 

The conflict between the self and the world is the 
conflict of naturalism and nihilism. Where naturalism 
supplies a kind of social synthesis, which may appear 
plausible when viewed from without, nihilism rejects 
such a synthesis and with it all arrangements of individ- 
uals under a general head. True individualism is neither 
naturalistic nor nihilistic; it agrees with naturalism as 
to the general idea of organization, while it sympathizes 
with nihilism when the latter insists that the peculiar 
value of the individual must never be ignored. When 
naturalism sought to assemble men under the inclusive 
head of " society," naturalism appealed to certain human 
interests, as these seemed to promise the idea of com- 
munity; when nihilism revolted against the circle which 
had been drawn about living individuals, it made its 
appeal to a very different sense within the individual. 
" Be social, and you will be happy " ; such was the 
promise of scientism. " Be egoistic, and you will be 
free " ; such was the plea of nihilism. 

It is easy to be social, since nature arranges human 
beings according to instinct; it is difficult to be human, 
for the quality of humanity is elaborated only as the 
valuating will affirms the character of mankind. Men 
are easily caught in the net of nature when they betray 
their fondness for happiness and their interest in the 
immediate welfare of existence, whence a hedonic and 
hygienic social arrangement is swiftly consummated. 
But to arrange human life according to the category of 
value and to have a synthesis which conserves the char- 
acter of humanity is a matter of more moment, of 
greater difficulty; yet, it is the valuational synthesis 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 483 

which the individualist sets before his eyes as the desired 
consummation. The sharp difference of issues involved 
appears at once when one asks oneself the following 
question: Are we to expect that human organization 
comes about by means of continuity with nature, or by 
virtue of a creative arrangement peculiar to the con- 
scious working of the human will? Shall humanity 
suffer itself to be formed like a hive of bees, or shall 
it be created like a free republic of men? The social 
conception of life places its affair in the hands of an 
organizing nature; humanistic thinking prefers to take 
the matter into its own hands for the purpose of making 
the State what the State ought to be. 

That which the continuity of naturalism holds out is 
the promise of happiness, whence sociality becomes so 
much hedonism. Is it possible for men to unite under 
the banner of common happiness? Naturalism has made 
this assumption in behalf of man whom naturalism has 
looked upon as a creature who seeks immediate satis- 
faction in the sensuous order. With the idea of pleas- 
ure at any price and with the optimistic assumption that 
life organizes its forces for the very purpose of pro- 
moting pleasure, the socializing hedonist proceeds with 
his hasty generalization. To have abandoned all idea 
of continuity and to have proceeded from the assump- 
tion that human life as such begins just as soon as man 
wills to live his human life, would have placed the social 
thinker in a pessimistic predicament from which his 
optimistic logic had provided no means of escape. In 
place of optimistic continuity, individualism sets up the 
ideal of pessimistic creativeness ; according to the pes- 
simistic point of view, it is so hard to be human and to 
be human is such a fine art that, far from trusting to 
the rough efforts of the natural order, individualized 
human beings must take the affair into their own hands 
and evince humanity as an ethical product. Such a 

31 



484 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

view is pessimistic, not in any popular sense of sad- 
thinking as opposed to glad-thinking, but because it in- 
sists that, with all the passage of time in the natural 
order and with all the efforts of mankind in the world, 
humanity has not yet made its appearance upon the 
globe, nor can humanity come into being until humanity 
makes use of the emancipated individual and thus wills 
itself. If humanity were a hedonic arrangement framed 
for the greatest amount of happiness or the most perfect 
social health, the problem of life would not be so con- 
fusing or contradictory; but, since humanity seems to 
be an arrangement of values instead of a summation of 
pleasures, the superficial methods of social thinking do 
not avail when one seeks a genuine form of human 
synthesis. 

In trusting to nature to arrange for the synthesis of 
men under the form of humanity, ethics has assumed 
that such a synthesis can be brought about upon the 
basis of raw human nature. Again it is the contrast 
between the mere humanitarianism of nature and the 
humanism of culture. It is indeed pleasant for breth- 
ren to dwell together in unity, but by what means is 
such a synthetic unity of souls to be brought about? 
According to the principles of naturalism, this unity is 
to come about by the exercise and expression of one's 
outward nature after the manner of what is called altru- 
ism; according to another point of view, the desired 
unity can be consummated only as one cultivates that 
inner nature whose source is human nature as such. 
This anti-social yet humanistic view proceeds upon the 
assumption that humanity is superiority to society, and 
this " humanity " it considers, not as a substantial form 
of expression, as though humanity were but a conceptual 
shell or holder for the individual, but in an adjectival 
manner as a quality of life. In the light of this dis- 
tinction, the most social of individuals, say the uncul- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 485 

tured philanthropist, might be all but wanting in human- 
ity, while the most human of individuals, say Emerson 
or Ibsen, might be equally lacking in sociality. It is the 
question whether humanity is an extensive or an inten- 
sive notion, whether it has to do with things which are 
included under a general head or attributes which are 
applied to a particular subject. To be human, one must 
be human; that is, to be human socially, one must first 
be human individually. Now the prevalent method of 
grouping men has always been based upon the exterior 
and extensive method where quantity of life was the 
leading idea. 

The attempt to establish a social synthesis of selfish 
beings by emphasizing immediate interests and exterior 
considerations has produced a dilemma in contemporary 
ethics, whence the moralist cannot determine whether 
nature divides or unites the sons of men. In the animal 
order, which has served the moralist as model for mor- 
ality, there is neither a sense of selfhood nor an idea of 
sociality, even where animal life is individuated here 
and synthesized in the species there ; for this reason, the 
affairs of animal existence may well be left in the 
hands of nature. In man, however, natural individu- 
ation becomes an individualistic " I am," while the ex- 
terior social synthesis according to the principles of 
species becomes conscious sociality. To what extent 
can the principles of naturalism serve to define these 
two contrary ideas? In what manner can nature bring 
them to a mutual understanding? Viewed from one 
angle, man is thoroughly selfish; looked at from another 
point of view, man is equally social. In the ethical 
system of Adam Smith, wherein was made the first 
attempt to place morality upon a social basis, one can- 
not help perceiving the dualism between the fact of ego- 
ism in the idea of acquisitiveness, as this appears in 
The Wealth of Nations, and the equally plausible prin- 



486 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ciple of sociability, as this is found in the Theory of 
Moral Sentiments. The result of such social ethics is 
merely the rough union of raw human nature. In the 
dilemma of Darwinism, the same contradiction appears. 
The Origin of Species so emphasizes the struggle for 
existence that man must appear absolutely selfish, while 
The Descent of Man, ignoring the selfish principle 
already laid down in general, attempts to postulate a 
theory of conscience based upon the social nature of 
mankind. Which is right, the view of man seeking his 
own welfare and struggling for his own existence or 
the view of man exercising the sympathetic and con- 
scientious ? 

When a humanistic philosophy of life takes up the 
problem at the point where naturalism abandons it, such 
humanism is forced to the conclusion that naturalism 
has failed to analyze the factors with which it has been 
dealing. In the first place, humanism cannot accept as 
a description of man the idea of an animal ego strug- 
gling for his own existence and seeking his own wel- 
fare; then, humanism is equally averse to approving of 
that attempted social synthesis which is expressed under 
the superficial form of " sociability." The particular 
animal in the herd may be described as so much struggle 
for existence here, so much gregariousness there; but 
the individual in the social order has taken his place in 
a manner which naturalistic thinking does not attempt 
to explain. That which naturalism attempts to do is to 
unite the specimen with the species ; the aim of human- 
ism is to reconcile the self-conscious, self-willed indi- 
vidual with humanity. 

(2) Sociality and Humanity 

Where naturalism fails to analyze the elements of its 
problem in such a manner as to evince the essential 
nature of the self and society, it is equally lacking in 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 487 

ability to provide for a synthetic bond between them. 
Human beings have been expected to meet upon the 
lower plane of immediate welfare, as animals huddle 
to keep warm, as savages unite for mutual protection. 
When the individual had his place in the State, when 
his being was included in the Church, the resort to such 
biological expedients for explaining the social synthesis 
was unnecessary; but, when modern thought dispensed 
with the ideas of State and Church, it was felt that 
something must be done to offset the implicit anarchism 
which resulted from the liberation of the individual. 
Since the inception of modern thought, the attempt to 
provide for a practical synthesis among men has assumed 
various forms which stand out in peculiar contrast to 
the strong idealism of the ancient State and the mediae- 
val Church ; chief among these naturalistico-human ex- 
pedients are the juristic and hedonistic, the utilitarian 
and social. In each one of them, the animating impulse 
was to provide for the union of men upon the basis of 
the immediate rather than that of the remote. To sub- 
sume individuals under the general head of the State or 
Church was an effort which called upon the individual 
to look upwards beyond himself to a higher principle 
of synthesis, whence the desire to find a more human 
and more practical basis of union. Now, does not the 
naturalistico-social conception of life expect the indi- 
vidual to consider something below his humanity when 
he attempts to account for and further the idea of unity 
with his fellow men? 

In its attempt to bring the principle of human unity 
down to the level of man as man, modern humanism 
has builded better than it knew, so that man has now 
become all-too-human. Where once a supra-humanistic 
conception of life caused the individual to sever his 
connection with the remote, as this appeared in the 
idealistic and the past history of humanity, it now ap- 



4 88 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

pears that the actual conception of life has become infra- 
humanistic in that man considers the ground of his life 
as that which is beneath rather than in that which is 
above him. The ancients expected man to look upward 
for the goal of his life; moderns believe that one should 
look downward and consider the source of one's exist- 
ence. As a result, what is now called " humanism," 
instead of being an attempt to lower the tone of a life 
which had become too sharp, has become an endeavor 
to raise the tone of a life which naturalism has made 
too flat. One humanism was the struggle for humanity 
in opposition to an excessive superiority; the other hu- 
manism has become a striving after a humanity which 
suffers from that extra-inferiority which appears so 
habitually in the naturalistic view of things. In the 
practice of the second humanism, the individualist of 
the nineteenth century was merely a thinker who wished 
to make life appear genuinely human rather than merely 
natural. The first humanism sought to make man's life 
less remote, less artificial ; the second humanism is now 
striving to make that life appear less immediate, less 
naturalistic. 

When man as man took the affairs of life into his 
own hands, he began by asserting the rights of mankind 
in opposition to the traditions which hitherto had guided 
him. Man seemed sufficient unto himself; by means of 
reason, man felt able to describe his own existence; 
through the principle of rights, he felt sufficient unto 
the demands which life made upon him. The philos- 
ophy of rights, as this obtained in the Enlightenment, 
was little more than the expression of man's desire to 
define his own being and to dictate his own activities. 
Such a juristic philosophy, whose ground appeared to 
be at once anarchistic and atheistic, was brought forth 
with the optimistic belief that the philosoplry of rights 
was able to contain the spiritual values which had pre- 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 489 

viously been expressed in the form of prince and priest 
without the usual impedimenta of State and Church. 
Then arose the question whether the principle of natural 
rights had the synthetic power to unite man with man 
in a purely human society. Where Grotius had pro- 
ceeded upon the optimistic assumption that the juristic 
principle was socially synthetic, Hobbes sought to show 
that the instinct of rights was disintegrating and polem- 
ical; whence Puffendorf made his attempt to reconcile 
the opposition between the social optimism of the one 
and the egoistic pessimism of the other. The place 
where humanism takes hold of this historic problem is 
neither on the altruistic nor the egoistic side, but at the 
very basis of the problem itself, whence humanism raises 
the question whether the principles of naturalism, as 
represented by both Grotius and Hobbes, are sufficient 
according to any interpretation of them to bring about 
the union of man with man. 

The juristic synthesis of earlier modern thought had 
its counterpart in the hedonism of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Where the general principle of life was one of 
rights for the individual, the particular expression of 
this juristic sense was found in the sense of pleasure ; 
both private rights and private pleasures have due place 
in the system of Hobbes. Now that man was to be 
considered as man, there arose the question whether it 
is in human nature to make man self-seeking or of 
social tendency. From one point of view, human nature 
seemed to make for segregation; from another, the con- 
gregative tendency was observed. There were egoists 
who made a show of consistent psychological argument, 
and there were altruists whose appeal to human nature 
was just as favorable; then there were more liberal 
moralists who sought the natural synthesis of the op- 
posed principles of humanity. The point where indi- 
vidualistic humanism attacks the problem is neither on 



490 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



this side nor that, but in the very centre. Humanism 
thus raises the question whether the practical synthesis 
of self with self, if it can be brought about hedonically, 
is likely to be sufficient in itself or satisfactory in its 
character. 

The one-time struggle for sociality has now given 
place to the anthropological assumption that man is by 
nature gregarious, so that it is no longer an attempt to 
bring men together, but to adjust the naturally social 
relations as these obtain among men. No longer the 
simple principles of rights and pleasures, the synthetic 
principles which seem to unify men are to be found in 
the ideas of utility and sociality, in the thought that 
men work together and live together. As a result of 
the progress from the Enlightenment to the age of 
Positivism, it is no longer necessary to contend for the 
actuality of the social synthesis, which is beyond dis- 
pute; the contention is for the character of the syn- 
thesis, which is far from being a matter of course. It 
is theoretically possible to conceive of men working in 
harmony and living in all good-will without there being 
any true or worthy bond of unity among them, just as 
it is possible for one to assume considerable outward 
discord and mutual misunderstanding in the midst of 
an implicit unity of a higher character. A nation, like 
the Germany of the early nineteenth century, may be 
wholly disintegrated without and yet practically unified 
within, just as such a nation at a later period may 
achieve outward unity at the expense of the ideal under- 
standing which had previously prevailed. The spiritual 
unity of our own country before the Civil War was 
more perfect in the midst of sectional controversy than 
it has been since ; since when the material unity has come 
to cover it with a sort of social and industrial veneer. 
So likewise in the whole social order; it is possible to 
achieve exterior unity in both idea and deed without 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 491 

arriving at that true unity whose synthetic principles lie 
concealed in the hearts of men. 

It seems then that there are two distinct and contrary 
principles of practical synthesis in the heart of man. 
These have already been indicated by styling one the 
outer the other the inner; but there are additional 
methods of observing the clear contrast between them. 
According to optimistic naturalism, the practical syn- 
thesis of men has been achieved when scientific thought 
has hit upon a plan which provides for the co-existence 
in so many groups of interrelated human beings. Here, 
again, it is the zoological ideal of gregariousness which 
has served the thinker in postulating his social synthesis. 
Man, so this thinker argues, has sprung from the animal 
order; if, in this animal order, life makes use of the 
gregarious idea, it is reasonable to suppose that life has 
done the same in the case of mankind, whence the aim 
of morality consists in perfecting and intensifying that 
implicit sense of sociality which is man's by natural 
inheritance. On the other hand, there is a pessimistic 
humanism which, while ready to admit that nature has 
produced in man a gregarious creature, is still dissat- 
isfied with the kind of synthesis which is found in the 
organic life of man as such. Pessimism thus admits 
that it is easy and natural to be social, but contends that 
it is hard to arrive at humanity as an ideal; with this 
distinction in mind, the pessimist contends for a human- 
ism which shall represent the life of man in its trans- 
natural aspects, while it is upon the basis of the trans- 
natural that the pessimistic humanist seeks to perfect 
the bonds of unity among the sons of men. 

When optimistic sociality and pessimistic humanism 
are further compared, it appears that the social con- 
ception of life lays its emphasis upon joy and love, 
while the humanistic ideal betrays an affinity for pain 
and hatred. How, then, may it be assumed that the 



492 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



pessimistic humanist has at heart a desire for the prac- 
tical synthesis of men? It is not easy, still less is it 
plausible, when the pessimistic humanist attempts to 
construe pain as joy, hatred as love; yet he who is at 
all familiar with humanity will not fail to observe that 
man often uses strange and contradictory methods of 
arriving at his conclusions, in pressing forward toward 
his goals. Humanistic pain, while in no sense so much 
conscious joy, is really pledged to an ideal which, now 
painfully unrealized, still has the power to produce joy 
when attained. In this manner, Fichte and Goethe may 
be said to have felt an ideal joy in the thought of a 
united Germany, while they actually felt pain when they 
considered the real conditions of the Fatherland. By 
parity of reasoning, one may express love for a more 
perfect order of life by emphasizing his hatred of the 
existing arrangement. This paradox is exemplified in 
the Slavonic consciousness as revealed in Turgenieff 
and Dostoievsky. With the cosmopolitan Turgenieff, 
the contempt for Russia was hatred and hatred alone. 
With such a Slavophile as Dostoievsky, there was just 
as much nihilistic hatred of country; but Dostoievsky 
made use of this for the sake of conveying his essential 
love of Russia. In speaking of one of the parties of 
his day, Dostoievsky says, " This hatred of Russia was 
quite lately almost regarded by some of our Liberals 
as sincere love for their country." 12 That which applies 
so aptly in the case of nations in particular is no less 
pertinent in the instance of society in general, whence 
one's joy of life in the human order may express itself 
as so much pain in the midst of the actual social arrange- 
ment, while his love of humanity may express itself 
after the manner of complementary colors as the hatred 
of society as actually constituted. 

The two contrary attempts at social synthesis shown 

12 The Idiot, tr. Garnett, Pt. Ill, Ch. I. 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 493 

in connection with the idea of co-existence among men 
are no less opposed when they are brought to bear upon 
the idea of co-operation. Men are to live together and 
to work together; but, under what conditions may man 
be man, under what auspices may man do his work? 
According to naturalism, this question is to be answered 
in terms of that which is given in life; man is here and 
man works here, hence natural co-existence and natural 
co-operation. The general effect of nature, as nature is 
now understood, is to bind men in a rough social syn- 
thesis ; the general tendency of work in the immediate 
order is to make this natural synthesis more binding, 
more intense. Viewed from without as so much social- 
ized existence, it is unnecessary to emphasize that desire 
for co-existence and co-operation which characterized 
the earlier period of modern thought; for men are se- 
curely linked together by ties of natural existence and 
socialized work. The pathetic feature of the socialized 
arrangement of life, as this now appears in both theory 
and practice, is that the worth of life departs just at 
the moment when one might expect it to enter. Life 
is at last understood as that which is social ; life is at 
last organized in the form of socialized labor; never- 
theless, life has never appeared so intolerable to those 
who expect life to have worth as it does at the present 
hour. Granted that the material possibilities of life are 
now realized as never before, so that the sons of men 
in this generation enjoy benefits of which their fathers 
never dreamed, the fact remains that the spiritual pos- 
sibilities of life are so removed from actual existence 
that contradiction in thought and discord in activity 
are the most emphatic notes of contemporary existence. 
Scientism has become so sullen in its affirmation of 
the naturalistic existence of mankind and sociality has 
become so brutal in its assertion of the co-operative 
activities of men that the scientifico-social synthesis has 
become intolerable. 



494 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Where individualism long since bade farewell to the 
scientifically arranged and socially organized world, an 
individualizing humanism pledges itself to the idea of 
a bond among the sons of men, but refuses to accept 
the idea that this bond is to be found in the scientific 
idea of co-existence and the social ideal of co-operation. 
Thus arises the question, How is the practical syn- 
thesis of life to be described ; under what conditions 
is it to be perfected? To perfect a social program 
which shall act as a panacea for every ill encountered 
in the scientific-social order is to presume too much of 
philosophy, even when philosophy may exercise the right 
to indicate life-ideals ; and ideals man will have in the 
form of a general conception of life and a persistent 
motive for action. L,et it not be assumed that scientifico- 
social thought has so applied its inherent positivism as 
to have excluded all forms of the ideal. Such social 
positivism has very intense ideals which appear as gen- 
eral notions and common aims. No, it is not the exist- 
ence of the social ideal which one may question, but its 
character. Where the social ideal of life is rejected by 
the individualizing humanist, it is incumbent upon this 
humanist to supply a basis for the practical synthesis 
of man's active life. 

2. Value as Synthetic Principle 

Individualism is interested in the scientific attempt to 
assemble men upon the basis of sociality; at the same 
time, individualism cannot convince itself that sociality 
is the proper basis for that synthesis which is expected 
to produce humanity as such. The kind of men which 
sociality attempts to bring together is marked by noth- 
ing more than simple, sensuous response to the natural 
order and equally simple and impulsive reactions upon 
the things of the world; does this kind of receiving and 
reacting men supply the mind with the idea of true 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 495 

humanity? From the view-point of individualism, hu- 
manity is made of finer stuff: already we have found 
humanity to be characterized by the aesthetical; ulti- 
mately we shall observe how the life of humanity is 
intelligible; here we must emphasize the fact that hu- 
manity is significant of value. To bring about the 
essential synthesis of the sons of men, we must reckon 
with our host, and must thus appreciate the fact that 
men are marked by aesthetic interests, moral values, 
and intelligible ideas. In general, the Enlightenment 
was guilty of poor anthropology, but it was not wanting 
in ethical ideals ; ignorant of man's nature but appreci- 
ative of his character, the Enlightenment insisted that 
man cannot, will not, come into the social order until 
he is satisfied that such social life is in keeping with his 
ethical character. It was the work of the scientifico- 
social nineteenth century to show that man as creature 
is already in the social order; but, in laying hold of the 
biological, the nineteenth century let go of the ethical, 
whence scientific sociality proved the actual fact of the 
social synthesis without at the same time evincing its 
ethical worth. 

True humanism, which has not forgotten the merits 
of the Enlightenment, has no desire to relegate man to 
a condition of naive egoism; for true humanism recog- 
nizes the obvious fact that man finds himself in an order 
of life at once natural and social. Nevertheless, indi- 
vidualistic humanism, with its persistent ideal of life's 
value, is anxious to interpret the social synthesis in such 
a manner as to include something more than mere co- 
existence and co-operation. As a result of this ethical 
scruple, humanism would take the social as its terminus 
a quo but not as its terminus ad quern; humanism ac- 
cepts the psychology of sociality but rejects its ethics. 
With this distinction between the nature of life and the' 
character of life before it, humanism would proceed 



496 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

from the manifest sociality of human existence to the 
elaboration of such a synthesis as shall conserve the 
character of man's life. It is not necessary to confine 
one's thought to sentiments and general principles in the 
endeavor to account for the unity of mankind; it is only 
necessary to make use of the principle of value to arrive 
at this end. To employ the principle of value as the 
basis of social synthesis, humanism simply asserts that 
man as man is a valuing creature rather than a purely 
perceiving organism, just as man carries on a process 
of activity which is a work of worth rather than so 
much organic functioning. It is in terms of ethical 
value then that humanism attempts to answer the ques- 
tions, What is man's nature? What is man's work? 

(i) Man as Valuer 

The anthropological conception of man as creature 
and as member of a species was wholesome in the cul- 
ture of the western world after man had been over- 
rationalized and over-moralized ; nevertheless, the ethical 
estimate of man cannot be set aside when scientism 
seeks to supply the mind with a more impressionistic 
picture of human existence than the formalism of the 
Enlightenment was willing to supply. It is man as 
valuer who is to be related to the social order; it is of 
men with the inherent values of their human nature 
that the social order is to be constituted. Where earlier 
modern thought sought to unite men as beings with 
rights and pleasures, it is now the duty of ethics to 
unite men as valuing creatures. Realizing that men 
can be and are assembled naturally without any juristic 
calculation of the rights of all, without any hedonic 
consideration of the happiness of all, social thinking has 
rested content with the naturalistic grouping of men as 
this was found in experience. But does nature supply 
the basis of a real synthesis when nature limits her 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 497 

influence to the naive sense of community that is due 
to common wants and common desires? Such a syn- 
thesis, so dear to the sociologist, is little more than a 
consciousness of species, a feeling that all are members 
of the same human tribe. To unite men in a synthetic 
whole makes necessary the appreciation of what men 
are, not merely what they appear to be; now the essence 
of humanity seems to make its presence felt in the form 
of human worth. 

When humanism seeks to make answer to the ques- 
tion, " What is value? " it is able to do this in terms of 
genuine human nature. To the idea of value, overtures 
may be made in the name of pleasure, even when the 
moralist has no right to pronounce immediate judgment 
and thus make value equal to pleasure. To feel pleas- 
ure is simply to be a creature of flesh and blood; but 
to appreciate pleasure, as one does in art and morality, 
is to involve something more strictly human. In the 
midst of his warm experiences of pleasure, man is con- 
scious of a hedonic residuum, whence he is led to feel 
that there is about pleasure something which cannot be 
wholly absorbed by the emotions, but must be taken up 
by the intellect in the form of judgment. Thus, when 
one enjoys pleasure, the pleasurable experience has a 
meaning to him in the totality of his life as man, whence 
he is in a position to judge whether life as experienced 
is something satisfying or disappointing. Again, when 
one fails to experience an anticipated pleasure, the want 
of that desired feeling, instead of revealing itself as so 
much lack of joy, appeals to the mind as so much loss 
of value. In this manner, the presence of pleasure is 
the affirmation of value; the absence of pleasure, the 
negation of value: the purely psychological and tem- 
porary gives way before the ethical and permanent, so 
that out of pleasures and pains the life-values of op- 
timism and pessimism are built up within the soul. 



498 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

If the independence of value appears when the indi- 
vidual, instead of submitting to his experiences, sub- 
jects them to intellectual scrutiny, the more complete 
emancipation of value from pleasure comes about when 
the individual indulges his active feelings in the form 
of desire. Where feeling is peripheral, desire is cen- 
tral ; where feeling is passive, desire is active. The 
presence of volition in desire makes it possible for the 
individual to seek that which in external experience may 
be pleasurable, indifferent, or painful ; man is ardent in 
the pursuit of pleasure, but he is no less active in the 
quest of the indifferent and the painful. In the attempt 
to answer the difficult psychological question, " How 
can the mind desire that which is painful ? " it is 
necessary to observe that in such desiderative cases, 
that which the mind seeks is not pain as such but the 
object which happens to involve painful experience. 
If this distinction between pain as a feeling and the 
painful character of the object sought by desire is not 
sufficient, it may be noted further that what man desires 
is promoted and sanctioned by the sense of worth which 
attaches to the object sought. How man can desire that 
which is painful is explained by the fact that man judges 
the object in question to be of value to him; and how 
it is possible for man to attribute value to that which 
is actually painful is explained by the fact that what 
may be painful in some exterior and particular phase 
of life may be judged valuable in the light of interior 
life as a whole. 

Now it is man as valuer who is to be related to the 
social order, not man as the exponent of mere rights 
or the recipient of particular pleasures. At the same 
time, the purely anthropic notion of man, as a creature 
whom nature renders ripe for the social order, is guilty 
of so confining its attention to the sheer form of human- 
ity so simply outlined in social existence that it ignores 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 499 

the rich valuational content of man's veritable existence. 
As a result of this formal view of man, the social syn- 
thesis becomes a mere sketch to be filled in with the 
colors of man's essential content of humanity. Instead 
of striving upward toward this obvious social synthesis, 
which is given in nature, humanism endeavors to pass 
onward beyond the crudely social to the truly human. 
The form which this striving for the human assumes, 
reveals itself in culture and morality, in connection with 
which man endeavors to perfect both his inner life and 
the lines of connection which relate him to his fellow- 
man. In the case of a nation, America for example, 
there may be the empirical and economic forms of 
interdependence which seem to make the people of that 
nation one ; along with this general and exterior form 
of unity, there may be, as in the case of the French 
people, an inward unity due to national culture and 
national morality. From the view-point of sociality, 
their exterior principle of connection may seem to serve 
as a social synthesis ; from the standpoint of humanism, 
it becomes necessary to impose upon this lower form 
of social unity a higher synthesis due to the existence 
and activity of man as a valuer. With individual nations 
in particular, with a whole continent in general, and 
with humanity universally, this inner struggle for human 
values is one of the most obvious facts of history. Why, 
then, do social thinkers persist in assuming that the 
miscellaneous assembling of nature is sufficient in ac- 
counting for the existence of humanity? 

Only as mankind asserts itself in the form of spiritual 
values is it possible even to approximate to the synthesis 
which seems so desirable. In the career of individual- 
ism, it was apparent that nothing could be done with 
man until the characteristic content of his life was made 
the point of departure for all social consideration. When 
this content was ignored, the individualist was found 



5oo 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



asserting his private, anti-social being by means of im- 
moralistic pessimism. Perhaps the same philosophic 
pessimism, due as it is to the pathos of the remote in 
life, may have its place in the social life of man, so that, 
as individuals are found striving after inner perfection, 
nations, races, and even larger groups of humanity may 
appear to be attempting the same thing. In the larger 
sense, humanistic pessimism is only the arduous, an- 
guished striving after that which nature has not been 
able or not seen fit to bestow upon the sons of men; 
that which these humanistic pessimists have before them 
as their goal is the unity of the individual with his own 
life and the unity of that life with the life of mankind 
in general. Germany, previous to 1870, presents a con- 
vincing picture of this twofold pessimism in accord- 
ance with which chosen individuals, like Lessing seek- 
ing classic beauty, Schiller pursuing the ideal of naive 
poetry, Kant struggling for the supreme good, Goethe 
elaborating the harmony of his poetic existence, sought 
the value of humanity while the whole nation writhed 
in its struggle for spiritual unity. In contrast with 
this striving after an inwardly Germanic character, 
Germanic sociality presents an unconvincing contrast. 
The career of humanity at large is comparable to the 
course of a nation in particular, and the history of 
mankind seems to have set before it the ideal of the 
complete humanization of the human species as some- 
thing characteristic and valuable. 

The complete humanity of man is an idea which con- 
tains the meaning of all progress; man is to become, 
must become, human both individually and socially. 
In the Slavonic consciousness, the inherent sense of 
nihilism is such as to neutralize the meaning of natural- 
istic evolution and social development, because the inner 
meaning of life fails to appear in the midst of exterior 
civilization. It is true that now and then, as in the case 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOLE 501 

of Dostoievsky, the complete sense of life, " the highest 
synthesis of life," appears as in a flash in the sharp 
light of which the individual feels that he has attained 
to perfect harmony; but, since the Slavonic mind cannot 
set this idea of harmony before it as a goal, it relapses 
into philosophic nihilism. In this spirit, Kirillov, in 
The Possessed, having had fugitive glimpses of such an 
unearthly harmony, raised the question, " What's the 
use of evolution when the goal has been attained?" 
Individualism answers such a question by declaring that, 
while, from the standpoint of the natural and social, 
man cannot achieve anything new out of the evolutionary 
process, from the view-point of humanism he has before 
him the ideal of that humanization of man in accordance 
with which the higher, nay highest, life-synthesis may 
become realizable. Such an idea is not guilty of the 
fallacy which usually adheres to Utopianism ; for, where 
Utopianism sets its eye upon the ideal goal as such, 
humanism lays its stress upon the progressive means in 
accordance with which the implicit goal is to be achieved. 
Remove this striving after the remote, and you obliterate 
the meaning of man's moral life. But adhere to the 
ideal of human harmony and interpret it in the light of 
value, and the meaning of man's extra-natural, extra- 
social activity becomes apparent and convincing. Fur- 
thermore, it is upon the basis of remote worth that men 
may be unified indeed, where natural sociality can do 
no more for them than to place them together in a loose 
form of co-existence. 

(2) Humanity a World of Values 

The attempt to synthesize human beings upon the 
basis of value is to be urged, not merely because the 
idea of value seems to promise a spirit of mutual under- 
standing, but because the individuals who are to be 
brought together are themselves valuers. If one per- 



502 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



sists in upholding the idea of the old hedonic synthesis, 
one is confronted with the problem of assigning uni- 
versal happiness to creatures who seem to be in quest 
of some other form of human realization ; as a result, 
happiness for all does not apply to individuals who 
desire worth for themselves. To abandon the hedonic 
synthesis, as recent ethics has done, and to seek the 
unification of men upon the basis of natural social and 
immediate interest is to overlook the fact that the indi- 
vidual does not want merely natural existence for him- 
self; why, then, should he seek to promote in all men 
that which does not seem sufficient for each viewed as 
an individual? It must be apparent that men have been 
bound together by some principle other than that of 
common happiness, since the history of nations fails to 
show that the common bond among members of the body 
politic was in any sense a universal desire for happiness. 
Can one review the history of ancient Hebrew and 
Hindu, the career of Greece and Rome, and the devel- 
opment of modern nations, and then insist that the idea 
of national happiness was the synthetic principle which 
operated to make the particular nation what it was? 
As with nations, so with races : can one speak cogently 
of " Aryan happiness," of " Semitic joy," or of " Mon- 
golian felicity " ? But, where the hedonistic fails to 
reveal its synthetic power, the principle of worth is of 
such integrating import that one need not hesitate to 
reckon upon the basis of " Aryan values " and " Semitic 
values," of " Chinese values " and " Christian values." 
Where value unites men, happiness either disintegrates 
them or leaves them in an ethical position purely prob- 
lematic. 

Valuers are to be united upon the basis of value; 
such is the method of that humanistic synthesis which, 
when speaking of the joy of life, found a beginning in 
the idea of common culture. But what is there about 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 503 

the principle of value which fits it to serve as an attri- 
bute of the individual and a principle of causal con- 
nection among men in general? Happiness is frankly 
divisive, whence enjoyment becomes either a mine or a 
thine. It is undeniable that an altruistic individual can 
forego somewhat of his private happiness for the sake 
of the other person; but the result is so much sacrifice 
on the part of the one and so much lack of dignity on 
the part of the other. With value, the case stands other- 
wise, so that one cannot give that which is so thoroughly 
his own as his sense of life's value, while the other 
cannot receive the values of any would-be giver. At 
the same time, where one may take happiness from life, 
and that in such a manner as to deprive another of this 
boon, it is impossible to appropriate any value which is 
not by its nature a human value as such. If such a 
discrimination in favor of the value-principle seems 
dubious to any one, let him for a moment reflect upon 
the thought that, whereas the feeling of pleasure is an 
element, the feeling of value is a compound of con- 
sciousness, so that more is to be expected of it. In 
addition to its more complex nature, the sense of value 
is permanent where the feeling of pleasure is transitory ; 
whence it holds out more promises to both the striving 
individual and the progressing race. With the strength 
and largesse which it possesses, the sense of value thus 
tends to promote the synthesis of men, who may find in 
the idea of worth something which they have in common. 
In the sphere of values, it seems both unnecessary and 
impossible to make the pathetic distinction between ego- 
ism and altruism ; such a discrimination is peculiar to 
the school of hedonistic ethics. Among the ancients, 
the idea of virtue was pursued without any question 
concerning a mine or thine; why, then, may there not 
be a common pursuit of value in which the character 
of the benefit sought shall be such as to preclude any 



5 04 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

social distinctions of private and public? That which 
both the ancient ideal of virtue and the contemporary 
ideal of value have in common is the idea of humanity; 
that is, the promotion of that which is essential to man 
apart from any thought of whether it is this or that 
individual who is to receive the benefit of it. When 
social thinking, laying its usual emphasis upon the mere 
expediencies of life, attempts to be ethical, it involves 
itself in certain invidious distinctions, whence morality 
must submit to the Either-Or of egoistic or social. This 
fact alone should show that social ethics is not genuine. 
Social ethics has drawn man's attention away from the 
real issue of life, whence it has made humanism impos- 
sible. That which sociality keeps before the mind, far 
from being human life with its inwardness, its character, 
and worth, is mere animal existence with its immediacy. 
If there is to be a higher synthesis of men, it must come 
about by an appeal to that which is essential to man, 
and this we believe to find in the principle of human 
worth. 

The principle of value upon the basis of which human- 
ism attempts to synthesize selfhood and society, stands 
out in clear contrast to the syntheses of rationalism 
and positivism. Under the auspices of rationalism, the 
union of the self with society was sought artificially by 
means of a calculating utilitarianism which endeavored 
to show that the greatest happiness of all would come 
by means of co-operation. It was the good office of 
positivism to point out that human society, far from 
being formed in any such manner, was instinctive in 
mankind, which was social long before the idea of indi- 
vidualism appeared. In attempting to thrust itself for- 
ward beyond the positivistic, humanism is led to realize 
that rationalism, with all of its artificiality, was bent 
upon making the social assume the character of man as 
man, whence the general character of humanity was 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 505 

preserved by the rationalistic synthesis. Where posi- 
tivism gains in naturalness by its appeal to the instinctive 
gregariousness in the human species, it loses in ethical 
character when it perfects a social order which is not 
worth perfecting. If the perfect health and perfect 
functioning of the social organism appeals to the moral- 
ist as something scientifically true, it does not follow 
that such a hygienic notion is able to express the appar- 
ent meaning of the life of a species which is obviously 
bent upon working the works of man. Let it be granted 
that man cannot deliberately create the social order, but 
let it further be recognized that, when man looks to 
nature to make his social life possible, there is still some- 
thing truly human which man must do. 

To make man social is as unnecessary as to carry 
coals to Newcastle; but to take the socialized man and 
make a human being of him is in no sense supereroga- 
tory. It is thus the aim of a humanistic philosophy of 
life to turn the social into the human, to erect the human- 
istic synthesis upon the basis of the social synthesis. The 
elaboration of the humanistic synthesis is to come about 
by the creation of a world of values; how is such an 
order of values to be understood? From the form of 
expression just employed, it might seem as though we 
looked upon man as having before him the amiable task 
of placing an entirely new world upon the foundation 
of the social order which he finds in his human life; 
but no such creation de novo is for a moment proposed. 
That which humanism sets before itself as its real task 
consists in the recognition of the fact that man as man 
has ever been a creator of values — values which appear 
in his art, his morality, and his religion. If nature, 
with her tendency to synthesize, has made man social, 
it has ever been the work of man to make himself 
human; in humanizing himself, man has taken social 
life as his point of departure, not as his goal. It may 



5 o6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

perhaps be pointed out that the idea of humanity as a 
world of values is very vague in comparison with the 
concrete notion of man as a socialized being; but hu- 
manism can reply to this criticism by insisting that the 
purely tribal conception of man as one who lives the 
life of the community is far from being worthy of the 
human species which has set before it some more char- 
acteristic goal. To have human beings snugly grouped 
in a social order where they breathe the same air and 
have the same ideas is not equivalent to the idea of a 
true synthesis of humanity. When the work of social- 
ity is done, the work of humanity has just begun. 

The world of values, instead of being made up of 
something over and above humanity, is humanity itself. 
To be human is to avoid the extremes of selfish struggle 
for existence and social solidarity; it is to perfect that 
complete system of human life which is found in man 
as man. In the pursuit of that which is the truly human 
order, the individualist may appear to be anti-social ; but 
the moral affirmative which seems to be destroying the 
given order is only asserting the existence of a higher 
one. The individualist is at heart interested in some 
sort of human synthesis ; he appears anti-social only 
because he refuses to accept naturalistic sociality in lieu 
of that unifying conception which he postulates as the 
veritable goal of all human life on earth. Perhaps it 
may be said that the humanistic individualist is aiming 
at the idea of culture or civilization as the synthetic bond 
which prevails among the sons of men; or, if it still be 
insisted that the pluralistic view of human life is to be 
expressed after the manner of the social, then it is upon 
a liberal conception of the social that the individualist 
must insist. Where the social is conceived of in such 
a manner as to make for the internal in man and the 
remote in his active life, there the social may serve to 
express the meaning of the world of values; but, where 



WORTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 507 

the social is only the social, the mere togetherness of a 
life in which the immediate and the expedient are dom- 
inant, such sociality cannot be palmed off as man's king- 
dom of values upon earth. 

To view man in the passing present, where the social 
consideration seems to be supreme, is to indulge the 
belief that the life of man is indeed made up of the 
immediacies and expediencies of sociality; but to con- 
sider man in the light of his history, where proper per- 
spective enters in, to apportion true shades and values 
to the picture, is to observe that the real goal of the 
past period was none other than the world of values 
which at present seems so ephemeral. That which his- 
tory has conserved for us is a system of Greek values 
here, an order of Christian values there, and what we 
behold in the whole earth viewed historically is so much 
mystical valuing in the east, so much practical valuing 
in the west. Upon the basis of such valuing were 
nations and races bound together, and upon the same 
valuational foundation is the life of man reared. To 
attempt the reconstruction of the past by assuming that 
men were bound together by means of common pleasure, 
common utility, or common sociality is to see how much 
more obvious is the valuational principle as the synthetic 
bond. 

Humanity is to be fashioned out of sociality, for it 
is with sociality rather than with individuality that the 
moralist is confronted. The difference between social- 
ity and humanity appears at once when we consider that 
sociality is our given condition, humanity an acquired 
state of existence. Furthermore, instead of depending 
upon nature working through instinct, humanity as a 
system stands or falls upon the deliberate act of the 
human will as the latter attempts to found a kingdom 
of values upon earth. From the optimistic point of 
view, man is to be satisfied with the immediate adjust- 



508 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

ment of individuals upon the basis of interest and gen- 
eral welfare, with the " health of the social organism " ; 
viewed in the more penetrating light of pessimistic hu- 
manism, man has no right to postulate happiness until 
the adjustment of man to man is accomplished in a 
manner peculiar to man's own nature. If the social 
adjustment of the sons of men appears in civilization, 
the human adjustment finds expression in culture, or 
the inward relation of man to his fellow in a world- 
order wherein each is aware of his own being, his own 
destiny as a human being. As yet, mankind is little 
more than a tribe in which social existence is fairly 
satisfactory, while the life of the individual has about 
it no more than a suggestion of culture. When man- 
kind takes up the burden of humanity, mankind is not 
expected to uproot itself and plant its being in the midst 
of the sea ; mankind is expected to infuse the humanistic 
spirit into the preparatory and inferior type of com- 
mon existence which is guaranteed by natural sociality. 
Having been social, man may become human; when his 
humanity sets it, then his individuality will have oppor- 
tunity to express itself. 



PART THREE 

THE TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE 
WORLD- WHOLE 

THE pursuit of the higher synthesis in the 
world-whole has already witnessed the elabo- 
ration of a superior aesthetic synthesis in the 
world and an elevated point of view in the world of 
action, which exerted a practical synthesis. It remains 
to be seen whether the analysis of truth, which led indi- 
vidualism to assume an irrationalistic and anti-natural 
attitude, is capable of the synoptic conclusion which has 
come about in two of the three phases of life under 
discussion. Both nature and humanity, which seemed 
to succumb to the smug generalization of scientism and 
sociality, have shown themselves of greater freedom and 
depth than current thought has been willing to assume ; 
in this manner, nature and humanity have shown their 
willingness to yield up the ideals of a life-joy and life- 
worth unknown to the positivistic mind. Will the natur- 
istic and humanistic suffer themselves to undergo a sim- 
ilar enlargement and deepening when the method of 
approach to them is that of truth? To answer this 
question, revised individualism must seek anew to dis- 
cover just what it sought to affirm by the phrase " one's 
own self " ; for the romantic and pessimistic discussion 
of human selfhood was such as to flout the restraint and 
disdain the aid of logic. When one has thus discovered 
the particular truth of selfhood within, he is expected 
to examine the meaning of truth without, so that he 
may bring about some sort of understanding between 
two contradictory phases of contemporary thought. 
Life-truth as felt within and world-truth as perceived 



5io 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



without seem mutually destructive. But is there not a 
freer and fuller view of truth in the light of which one 
may witness the synthesis of the inner and outer? 

I. ONE'S OWN SELF 

As the joy of life could not fail to involve the idea 
of self-existence, and as the worth of life could not 
exclude the idea of one's own work, so the truth of 
life is to be advanced only as the individual is viewed 
as having and as being a self in the world. In the 
present condition of human culture, the situation is such 
as to involve most frankly and consistently the idea of 
worth in life, because the contemporary condition of 
culture is one of work : to do is categorical ; to enjoy 
is purely hypothetical; to think is disjunctive. Yet, 
while current culture thinks it possible to view the joy 
and truth of life in a slanting manner, reserving its 
direct gaze for the problem of work, the philosophy of 
life has no right to extend special privileges to the 
activistic estimate of life. Philosophy of life insisted 
upon the joy of life, not merely because of the enjoy- 
ment involved therein, but because such enjoyment con- 
veyed the idea of existence; for it was by means of the 
eudaemonistic ideal that the independence of the soul- 
state was conserved. In the same manner, philosophy 
of life must now insist upon the idea of life's truth, not 
merely because the intellectual vision of the truth of 
things satisfies mental curiosity, but because such intel- 
lectualism has the happy fate of upholding the existence 
of the self which seeks both itself and the world in 
thought. Let culture continue to centre in the idea of 
work, let industry continue to emphasize the ideal of 
worth, and it will be found that the existence of the 
self in the world of sense and the reality of the self in 
the world of thought cannot be eliminated or degraded. 
At the same time, when it is admitted that, owing to 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 511 

his activistic nature, man cannot live vyithout work, it 
must likewise be insisted that man cannot live without 
joy, without truth. For more than half a century, cul- 
ture has considered man as though he were nothing more 
than a creature of work; but this blind energism seems 
to have come to the end of its reign, whence it becomes 
necessary for philosophy of life to consider anew, not 
only the claims of life's joys, but the demands of life's 
truth. 

Where joy is doubtless necessary to him who would 
experience the inward reality of life, the sense of truth 
is no less imperative for him who would acquire a per- 
manent sense of selfhood. The relation of the self to 
knowledge has never received sincere treatment; it has 
ever been expressed after the manner of " thought and 
thing," " subject and object," " mind and matter." By 
means of none of these conventional dualisms does the 
self come into its own. At the same time, knowledge 
has always been discussed without regard to the kind 
of being for whom that knowledge seems intended ; thus, 
it has been a lifeless perceiving of things or conceiving 
of thoughts. As a result, the adjective " human " which 
slipped into the titles of epistemological works by 
thinkers like Locke and Hume, failed to color the 
treatment of the understanding in its cogitations. The 
kind of knowledge which seems to adapt itself to the 
work of the understanding as human, is a knowledge 
based, not upon a frame-work of faculties, principles, or 
laws, but upon a genuine intellectual life. To consider 
knowledge as intellectual life is to consider the self as 
participating in the existence of the world which pro- 
duced it. Should not such a natural view of the ques- 
tion tend to remove the dualism of thought and thing, 
and that without driving one to a less hopeful monism 
in which neither thought nor thing is found? 



512 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

i. The; SeXF as Knower 

Knowledge is the supreme means by which the self 
comes into its selfhood. Idealism assumes with Socra- 
tes, Descartes, Berkeley, and Kant, that it is easy to 
arrive at the idea of selfhood, but difficult if not impos- 
sible to move out from this to knowledge of the world. 
Realism, which is sure of the world, finds it necessary 
to consider the self only as the self has the ability to 
represent the world as it is. Neither philosophic, that 
which looks from the self toward the world or that 
which looks from the world toward the self, has ob- 
served that the intellectual striving of the self has been 
for the purpose of self -existence. The ego would not 
merely have subjective thoughts about the world or ob- 
jective impressions of the world; the ego would come 
into its own being in the world. The Socratic com- 
mandment, " Know thyself," was noble enough, yet the 
manner in which it is executed often suggests mock 
heroism on the part of the antique thinker; similarly, 
the Cartesian struggle for the " I think " fails to repre- 
sent any quality of that inward effort by which living 
individuals like Goethe and Shelley, Emerson and Ibsen 
have sought to arrive at selfhood. The history of indi- 
vidualism has been a struggle for the content of self- 
hood, in the form of life- joy, life- worth, and life-truth. 
In the midst of this history, individualism has never 
assumed the " I think " to be a matter of course or an 
easy attainment; had this been so, individualism would 
have been unnecessary. 

Along with the difficulty experienced within the self, 
there would appear to be a corresponding degree of ease 
in connection with knowledge of the exterior world. 
In the history of epistemology, the situation has been 
reversed, so that the question of knowledge seems to 
have stood in a false light. Traditional thought has 
said, " We are sure of the self but not so sure of the 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 513 

world, whence we must do all within the power of our 
logic to lay down the grounds of objective existence." 
As a result, theory of knowledge has proceeded from 
within outwards, from the known self to the world as 
a possible object of knowledge. In the actual life of 
the individual, just the reverse seems to be the case; 
here, one is quite sure of objective things, but is by no 
means sure of him who perceives them. For this reason, 
individualism has advised man to turn from the objec- 
tive order to the self within, there to observe his own 
being and to make sure of it, if this be possible. The 
living thought of man has not been anxious to enhance 
the existence of the exterior order, but it has sought to 
build up some sort of inner life; on this account, all 
invitations to come out of the self have been of no 
avail with a creature who, when he was not philoso- 
phizing, was fully aware how extroverted was his poor 
nature. With its massiveness and power, the exterior 
world has been able to take care of itself, so that the 
individual has learned to have a care for his own being; 
as the architect saw the supremacy of gravity and sought 
to erect rigid columns and arches which should oppose 
its force, so the individual has employed the " I think " 
to oppose the omnipotence of the exterior order. 

Theory of knowledge has never been able to forget 
that most noble of errors which it was the fate of the 
Enlightenment to elaborate; the egoistic error in ques- 
tion was to the effect that the self as thinker is logically 
superior to and metaphysically supreme in the physical 
order. The individualist with his faith in the self might 
well wish that such solipsism were true; but the indi- 
vidualist knows full well that the shadowy " I think " 
peculiar to the Enlightenment is in no position to make 
itself the ground of either the world without or the self 
within. As a result of the situation which life itself pre- 
sents, it is the duty of the self, not to establish the world, 



514 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

which stands in need of no such subjective bolstering, 
but to establish the ego, which exists only by good for- 
tune and lives only by courtesy. The traditional egoist 
has never taken the time or had the courage to abide 
by the results of his preliminary egoism. Thus, the 
Socratic " Know thyself " surrendered to the Platonic 
world of ideas ; the Cartesian cogito yielded to the 
Spinozistic substance; Kant's ich denke longed for the 
moral order; while Fichte's Ich sought the Absolute. 

The beginning of the self, as the final form of an 
individualistic philosophy of life, has not thus far been 
urged; instead of hastening to the formalism of such 
a notion, the present method has seen fit to develop the 
idea of self-life in the world of sense, where the feeling 
of free, full enjoyment has assured us that the self has 
its own definite existence as the recipient of life's joy. 
Furthermore, the method of individualism pursued has 
found it expedient to regard the self of joy as the indi- 
vidual who has a work of its own in the world. When, 
finally, individualism seeks to come to an understanding 
with life, individualism becomes anxious to discover 
what kind and measure of reality may be attributed to 
the self which, thus far, has exhibited its nature in 
enjoyment, its character in work. Thus viewed, the 
idea of selfhood, instead of being a formal premise to 
the aesthetical and ethical conceptions of life, tends to 
assume the form of a concrete postulate the study of 
which is taken up, not primarily for its own sake, but 
with the aim of assuring philosophy of life whether 
the hope of self-enjoyment and self-activity was well 
founded. If there be no ultimate reality to the self, 
then the desire for enjoyment can only be denied, the 
claim to work invalidated. There must be something 
real which enjoys the aesthetic soul-states, something 
permanent which seeks self-expression through work in 
the world. 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 515 

Again, in the attempt to determine the reality of this 
personal factor in the worlds of enjoyment and action, 
in culture and social life, individualism does not proceed 
in Cartesian fashion from an " I think " to an " I am " ; 
for the existence of the self has already been shown 
through aesthetic enjoyment and worthy work. All that 
individualism attempts to do in its appeal to the intel- 
lectualistic principle is to show that the self-existent ego 
which has revealed itself in both the joy and work of 
life is an ego indeed; that is, that this ego is so intelli- 
gible in its character as to make self-knowledge pos- 
sible; the man may know what spirit he is of. In at- 
tempting to find a basis for the self, Descartes proceeded 
from self-knowledge to self-existence, while Kant re- 
garded the proposition, " I think, therefore I am," so 
synthetic that it was impossible for the understanding 
to deduce the predicate from the subject. According 
to the method which we have employed, it is not neces- 
sary to assert the " I am," since this personal propo- 
sition has already found abundant and irrefutable ex- 
pression in the joy and work of the self. The propo- 
sition now to be defended is, therefore, " I am, there- 
fore I think " ; that is, since the self has been found 
to exist in its states and impulses, it must be shown 
how such self-existence involves self-knowledge. Where 
the older individualism of both Socrates and Descartes 
sought to pass from thought to existence, modern indi- 
vidualism has busied itself with the actual task of 
bringing the self into existence through enjoyment and 
energy, so that the only task which remains for present- 
day individualism consists in showing that the claim 
to self-existence in both nature and humanity is well- 
founded and intelligible. In its decadent and nihilistic 
character, individualism has shown that self indeed ex- 
ists, and that in a most striking manner; to show that 
such intense selfhood is rational and philosophically 



33 



5 i6 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

worthy is practically the only task of individualism at 
the present time. 

In most strident contrast to the formal individualism 
expressed in the abstractionism of the Cartesian cogito 
and the Kantian ich denke, stand out the living expres- 
sions of individualism peculiar to the egoistic move- 
ment. The romantic joy of Schlegel, the morbid self- 
scrutiny of Poe, the impassibility of Baudelaire, and the 
self-seclusion of Huysmans forbid that we should doubt 
the existence of self-conscious states. The immoralistic 
ideals of Stendhal, the strong selfhood of Emerson, the 
criminal consciousness of Dostoievsky, and the anti- 
social self-assertion of Barres make it impossible that 
we should question the self-activity of the ego. The 
Satanism of Blake, the irrationalism of Stirner, and the 
irreligion of Wagner, are equally effective in evoking 
the self-existence of the ego as idea. When individual- 
ism was represented by the theologian and logician, it 
was quite easy to consider the self as a mere shadow; 
but when individualism was enforced by aestheticist, 
immoralist, and irreligionist, the attempt to think the 
self away became impossible. Having shown its reason 
for being, the self demands the right to exist, so that 
no notion short of reality will suffice to explain the 
individualistic phenomena of the nineteenth century. 

In the history of individualism, the idea of self- 
knowledge has expressed its tenets under the auspices 
of irrationalism; as a result, the religion of the self 
became irreligion. At the outset, the religion of irre- 
ligion, if we may so style it, was appreciated by Schleier- 
macher, who was devout and believing even when he 
was in the act of separating religion, here from reason 
and metaphysics, there from ethics and morality. With 
Schleiermacher, as later with Wagner, the deepest truths 
of religion were expressed in the form of irreligion, the 
most profound concerns of reason in connection with 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 517 

irrationalism. With Stirrier, the repudiation of the re- 
ligion of Hegelian Humanity led only to a negative irre- 
ligion, while with Baudelaire the essence of religion was 
clouded by a morbid mysticism. Nevertheless, the irre- 
ligious movement had at heart the interests of genuine 
religion, even when this movement could do no more 
than offer bitter opposition to the religion of reason and 
the religion of science. Now that religion has been 
delivered from its false friends and has been delivered 
over to its friendly foes, it is time for individualism to 
develop the thoroughly religious ideal implicit in the 
idea of self-existence and self-knowledge. 

When one seeks, not " truth " in the abstract, but the 
truth of life, he places himself in a position where he 
is led to make knowledge a means to an end. To ex- 
press this more accurately and more worthily, what the 
individualist does is to make knowledge the means to 
the end. Just as individualism insisted upon the Joy of 
Life in order that the self-consciousness of the soul- 
state might receive recognition, just as it urged the 
Worth of Life in order that self-activity might be seen 
to spring from an independent initiative, so it must now 
insist upon the Truth of Life in order that the idea of 
self -existence may be grounded in knowledge. In thus 
making knowledge the means to the end, individualism 
is not descending to any kind of utilitarianism or instru- 
mentalism, according to which thinking exists and goes 
on for the sake of this or that exterior end. With a 
superior teleology, individualism views knowledge as 
though it existed and exerted itself for the sake of an 
end which is single and supreme. In all this, there may 
be a kind of logical heteronomy; but it is the character 
of the other-than-knowledge-itself principle which re- 
deems thought from utilitarian pragmatism. With such 
pragmatism, individualism agrees that knowledge does 
not exist for the sake of pure, nameless cognition; the 



518 THE GROUND AND GOAD OF HUMAN DIFE 

point of separation between the two appears when indi- 
vidualism insists that the purpose of knowledge is to 
establish the self, while pragmatism seems to insist that 
the end of knowing is for the purpose of establishing 
some of the many secondary ends of that self which this 
pragmatism takes no care to substantiate. As joy is not 
for the mere purpose of entertaining pleasant feelings, 
but for the sake of establishing the self ; as value is 
more for the sake of the valuer than the evaluated; so 
truth and thought are elaborated by the self in order 
that the self may make sure of its own being as such. 
There should be no doubt that individualism has made 
use of knowledge as means to end; indeed, individual- 
ism has at times resorted to irrationalism for just this 
purpose. 

However paradoxical it may seem, the nescio of irra- 
tionalism and the cogito of intellectualism have at heart 
the sole aim of giving expression to the self-existence 
of the human ego. When thought is so perfected with- 
out that there seems to be no room for the free self in 
the world, it becomes necessary for the self to employ 
principles of irrationalism in order to assert the reality 
of that which lies outside of the narrow synthetic circle 
of what is called the known. But, when at last the 
narrow synthesis has been repudiated, and room for the 
self has been made, it becomes urgent for the individ- 
ualist to set about developing some positive idea of the 
self for which he is contending; this can be done, as 
we have seen, by insisting upon that sense of joy which 
evokes the inner state of consciousness as independent, 
by asserting the sense of interior worth as that which 
is intrinsic; but such forms of self-assertion stand in 
need of the final form of selfhood in the act of think- 
ing. Thus, it is by means of thought that the ego is 
able to assert itself in its superiority, so that thought, 
while not at all instrumental, has the effect of establish- 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 519 

ing something more than propositions. Thought is the 
supreme means of establishing the existence of the self. 
The dogmatism of the Enlightenment felt justified in 
assuming the existence of the ego, through which the 
world in seeking its existence was forced to pass as a 
camel through the eye of a needle; but the conditions 
of contemporary culture are such that, instead of assum- 
ing the existence of the self, philosophy of life must 
assert this self-existence, and this it does with the spirit, 
but not according to the method, of irrationalism. By 
means of empirical thought, we have become sure of 
the exterior world; by means of another kind of thought, 
we must become aware of the self. 

The thought-method by means of which the self comes 
into being is thus neither rationalism nor irrationalism, 
but super-rationalism ; such super-rationalism does not 
attempt to show by what means science may be possible, 
nor does it content itself with the anti-scientific asser- 
tion of the ego's existence as such, as was done by Kant 
and Nietzsche respectively; super-rationalism is merely 
anxious to indicate that higher synthesis which shall 
have the effect of including the self in the world-whole. 
Rationalism thought to express the supremacy of the 
self by making the world depend for its existence upon 
the "I think" of the ego; irrationalism, dismayed at 
the discovery that the ego was no longer in the world, 
sought pessimistic consolation in the idea that the ego 
may exist independently, and in opposition to the ob- 
jective order. Super-rationalism would neither exer- 
cise lordship over the world nor carry on sabotage 
against it; rather would it seek in the world the place 
which the self should occupy. In a word, super-ration- 
alism would have the self participate in the world. 
Where rationalism would regard the self as though it 
gave laws to the objective order, where realism con- 
siders the world as though it gave laws to the mind, the 



5 20 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

intellectualism which appeals to the individualist is con- 
tent to have the independent ego participate in the prin- 
ciples of knowledge which make the objective world 
what it is. Participation is thus neither a ruling nor a 
serving, but a sharing of the world's truth. From this 
point of view, the self can no longer say, " I rule the 
world," nor does it need to assert, " I oppose the world," 
for it is sufficient for the self to say, " I live in the 
world." 

2. Selfhood and Solipsism 

The participation of the self in the world has the 
effect of turning knowledge from a mere perceiving of 
the outer or a mere thinking of the inner into a genuine 
intellectual life within the world as a whole. However 
obvious such a conception of thought, the idea of an 
independent life within the world, as a play within the 
play, is somewhat new to the individualist. Thus far 
in the history of modern thought, the ego has been con- 
fronted by the diremption of an Either-Or; the self 
was all in rationalism, nought in empiricism. In the 
career of individualism as . such, that is, in the nine- 
teenth century, positivism . persisted in dismissing the 
ego that the scientifico-social order might exist undis- 
turbed, while romanticism was just as relentless in its 
assertion, " The world does not exist for the self." 
Neither dogmatic scientism nor nihilistic egoism is pos- 
sible in the world-whole; the self cannot be dismissed 
as a bird is driven from a corn-field, nor can the world 
be relegated to non-existence by the ego that simply 
rises above it. Driven out of the kingdom by the Saul 
of jealous scientism, the David of egoism is now per- 
mitted to return to the realm it is destined to inherit. 
To effect the return of the self and to bring about the 
reunion of the self and the world, the one thing needful 
is the higher synthesis of selfhood and worldhood. 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 521 

The misunderstanding that has arisen between the 
self and the world has been due to the theories of 
knowledge that have assumed the right to interpret the 
method by which the mind thinks the world. These 
theories have been rationalism and empiricism, romantic 
idealism and positivism; it was on the side of the ration- 
alistic and romantic that the egoist took his stand; for, 
where these seem to promise everything, empiricism and 
positivism were frankly opposed to the idea of inde- 
pendent selfhood. Thus adjusted to the question of 
knowledge, Descartes and the French classicists had 
no difficulty in establishing the supremacy of mind, 
while Fichte and the German romanticists were equally 
successful in asserting the independent existence of the 
self. But robbing Peter to pay Paul is hardly honest, 
and to despoil the world for the sake of improving the 
self is equally improper. The advocates of mind and 
the self, while justified in their enthusiasm for the " I 
think " and " I will," were not aware of the injustice 
toward the world-whole as an organization of things 
and persons; Kant's rationalism was intolerant when it 
asserted that the human understanding gives laws to 
nature while the human will dictates to the moral order ; 
Baudelaire's romanticism was vicious when it affirmed 
that the self may think and act aesthetically in defiance 
of truth and duty. From the ultimate effects of such 
irrationalism and immoralism, individualism is now 
slowly recovering. 

To cure individualism of the ills of irrationalism, 
philosophy must now cast about for a theory of knowl- 
edge which shall explain what is to be explained; that 
is, not the self here and the world there, but the self 
within its own world. The situation is not one in which 
the self rules the world or the world the self; it is a 
situation in which each exists and expresses its nature 
in its own way. Given the world and the self in mutual 



522 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



opposition, it becomes impossible to account for the 
most obvious of things, namely the natural commerce be- 
tween thought and thing; postulate the mutual agree- 
ment of the pair, and the problem of thought becomes 
simple and straightforward. The nature of this im- 
plicit agreement of macrocosm and microcosm seems to 
find more or less perfect expression in the idea of 
knowledge as an intellectual life within the world, where 
the thinking ego had its origin and has had its develop- 
ment. The philosophical endeavor to relate the mind to 
the world, after the mind has first been constituted and 
conceived of in independent manner, is as absurd as the 
political attempt to relate the self-constituted ego to a 
social order alien to its own nature. As Hobbes per- 
verted the political problem, Descartes prejudiced the 
philosophical question. Upon his return to Denmark, 
Hamlet may seem to be a stranger, yet he was to the 
manner born; the development of the mind may make 
it appear alien to the world, yet it is in the world that 
the mind finds its true place. When knowledge is 
viewed as intellectual life, wherein the cultural is as 
significant as the speculative, the empirical contention 
that things exist in independence of the mind's forms 
does no harm to the notion that the mind itself is free 
within ; on the other hand, the idealistic contention that 
the mind has the right and the power to reduce the 
world to order does no violence to the existence and 
behavior of things. It is not sufficient for the mind 
merely to think, for its genuine thinking consists in 
knowing what exists; again, it is not sufficient for the 
thing simply to exist, for the thing's complete existence 
must include the idea of being known. 

When mind as intellectual life within a knowable 
world receives due consideration, the imperfections of 
traditional views of knowledge immediately appear. 
Given a purely empirical point of view, it becomes diffi- 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 523 

cult to explain how the mind can copy its ideas of things 
from an order of existence conceived of as independent. 
To make the empirical copy, the mind must have a 
certain capacity for things, just as he who imitates 
nature must be somewhat of an artist. On the other 
hand, if the rationalist is right in asserting that ideas 
determine things, it is still to be explained how the 
mind can gain supremacy of an alien objective order. 
When, however, it is assumed that knowledge of the 
world comes about by the participation of intellectual 
life in the world, it is no longer necessary to assert 
either that things create ideas or that ideas create 
things ; it is sufficient to assert that the mind naturally 
recognizes things as they are, a knowledge with which 
the mind is content. One can hardly wish for the self 
if one must lose truth, nor can one care for that purely 
objective conception of truth which leaves the self out; 
but is such a choice necessary? Vedanta lays hold of 
the self in the very moment that it secures its hold upon 
the world of things ; Platonism constitutes the mind in 
the very act of comprehending the world. It is only 
our modern rationalism and romanticism that have 
sought to elaborate the ego in defiance of the world. 
As the result of modern thinking, the solipsistic impli- 
cation has arisen. 

In itself, the solipsistic situation is more a matter of 
curiosity than of concern; at the same time, theoretical 
solipsism affords an opportunity to consider the merits 
of the knowledge problem as this concerns the self. 
The difference in attitude between the individualist and 
the non-individualist may be expressed with strength if 
not with clearness when it is noted that individualism 
takes a pessimistic point of viewing in knowledge, while 
the rationalist has been content to rejoice in a kind of 
naive optimism. The optimism of the rationalist has 
been of such a nature as to lead the thinker to assume 



5 2 4 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



that, by indulging a due amount of thought, he may 
establish the reality of the self within and that so con- 
clusively as to disestablish the reality of the world with- 
out. How grand the assumption and how intense the 
fatuity of the rationalist when, sublimely convinced of 
self-existence, he began to exercise painful concern for 
the reality of the exterior order ! Oh, that the world 
without might be as sure of itself as is the ego within ! 
Such a solipsistic assumption was childish and optimis- 
tic; in its vapid notions individualism has never partici- 
pated. The pessimism of the individualist has been so 
intense and so real as to lead him to conclusions quite 
the contrary of school-solipsism. Pessimistic individ- 
ualism has sought to work toward rather than away 
from all solipsistic assumptions; it has worked, not for 
the sake of the exterior order, but against it. Striving 
after that selfhood which the rationalist had so vainly 
assumed, the romantic egoist sought to dismiss the world 
as a dream; the decadent condemned it as inferior; the 
symbolist disavowed allegiance to it by saying, le monde 
n'existe pas pour moi; egoists like Stirner and Nietzsche 
sought refuge in an irrationalism which should dismiss 
the world of things and persons. In this manner, the 
individualist has never really been a solipsist, but he has 
tried to be ; the individualist has never been able to deny 
the presence of the exterior, but he has done all in his 
power to dismiss it as something inferior and malign. 

This paradox tends to clear up when one reflects 
upon the actual situation in the world of knowledge; 
here it appears that knowledge of the world is easy and 
obvious, while knowledge of the self is difficult and 
dubious. Rationalism views the situation in exactly the 
opposite light ; but, while one might hesitate to assert 
flatly, " rationalism is wrong," it cannot be doubted that 
to-day the knowledge of the physical order has advanced 
so far beyond the knowledge of the self that solipsism, 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 525 

which is in itself impossible, is more of a desideratum 
than a danger. Individualism courts solipsism, because 
individualism sees that, although it were an error to 
believe that the self alone exists, it is wise to assert that 
the self does have some degree of existence in the world. 
The attitude of the anti-solipsist in the physical realm is 
akin to that of the anti-egoist in the social order; fail- 
ing to note that physical and social forces are in marked 
ascendancy, the anti-individualistic thinker persists in 
giving to him that hath already, for which purpose he 
tries to take away from the ego the little that it hath 
in its napkin. The social order has no right to demand 
altruism of the individual, who has already been forced 
to take his place exterior to himself; the physical order 
has as little right to insist upon realism, since the self 
has done far too much for the establishment of the 
exterior world. The just demand of the day is for a 
complete individualism in both the physical and social; 
thereby, the rights of the " I think " and " I am " may 
come in for recognition. Thus far in the history of 
knowledge, the influence of thought has not been cast 
in favor of the creature that has done the thinking; 
Protagoras has had no school. 

The individualism which seeks to effect a reunion of 
the self with the world is now convinced that, with all 
its brave resistance and strong self-assertion, the old 
individualism of irrationalism is a lost cause. In re- 
viewing the history of this movement, as this appeared 
under the divisions, The Struggle for the Truth of Life 
and Life the Place of Truths, the new individualism, if 
such it may be styled, keeps reminding itself that ration- 
alistic thinking ever tends to remove rather than to 
establish the thinker, just as the voter may vote away 
Tiis rights. At the same time, individualism realizes that 
the old resort to irrationalism was in vain, even when 
it had the effect of showing: that the self is different 



526 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

from the rest of the world. The solution of the prob- 
lem seems destined to come about only as the self makes 
use of thought as such, even when that may constantly 
threaten the self with destructive generalizations; the 
self must learn how to exist in some kind of intellectual 
order. In the same spirit, individualism must learn how 
to live within the world of things, even when pure sub- 
jectivity tends to afford a more convincing form of 
selfhood. Without the world, the self is as insignificant 
as " Columbus without America." 

The individualist has chosen the self rather than the 
truth; for of what value was that "truth" which elim- 
inated him from the world of existence? The choice 
to which the individualist was driven was due to that 
invidious tendency to survey the world apart from the 
self, the self apart from the world. But is the due aim 
of thought to establish difference or likeness between 
idea and thing? Just as long as thought and thing are 
looked upon dualistically as two principles, or monis- 
tically as two phases of some mysterious third, the con- 
flict for priority and supremacy will obtain. But, when 
the self is viewed naturally as something within the 
world, the adjustment becomes simple and mutual. 
The self has shown its ability to find joy in a world 
which might seem to be cold and colorless ; the self 
has found value in a world which seems to be made up 
of nothing but mere reality; and the self can find truth 
in the world that seems to consist in nothing but things. 
The older individualist sought joy, worth, and truth at 
the expense of the objective order; his opponent insisted 
upon objective reality at the expense of soul-states, free 
initiatives, and subjective affirmations. Both would 
appear to be wrong. The subjective realizes itself in 
the objective; the objective is discovered by the sub- 
jective; Columbus becomes Columbus only as he dis- 
covers America, while America is nought for man until' 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 527 

it has been discovered. The self alone is a morbid 
product moved more by Baudelarian " spleen " than 
by " ideal " ; the world alone is a dull and silent affair 
until the ego takes his place in its midst. Both the self 
and the world lose when they are kept apart; they gain 
when they are brought together. 

The higher synthesis which is implicit in the reunion 
of the self with the world comes about only as thought 
becomes more liberal, more versatile. As Classicism 
expressed the belief that all essential things were so 
thoroughly known that no real future was possible or 
desirable for humanity, as Scholasticism was inwardly 
persuaded that the establishment of its creeds marked 
the culmination of man's intellectual effort, so scientism 
has recently attempted to cast its fixed circle of knowl- 
edge about the human mind, whence the appeal to the 
future is forever in vain. Aristotle, Aquinas, and Comte 
thus reveal one of the most annoying characteristics of 
the human soul. The spirit of free, inward humanity 
has ever shown its readiness to elaborate higher syn- 
theses, and the time for a new departure is at hand. 
The need of wholesome novelty has been shown in the 
career of individualism, according to which the truth of 
life can be found only as one entertains and enjoys a 
fuller and finer conception of the world. 

It is quite plausible to assert that truth exists in and 
for itself, but it is just as tenable to affirm that truth 
exerts an influence in behalf of all that it touches. 
Instead of being a fixed quality like classic beauty, truth 
is like that sense of grace which Schiller likened to the 
girdle of Venus, because it could be put on and worn 
by one goddess as well as by another. 1 Thus viewed, 
truth refuses to become the property of one thing to 
the exclusion of another, just as it disdains allegiance 
to one phase of existence rather than another. With 

1 Tiber Anmut und Wiirde, in loc. 



528 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

such a versatile ideal of the true, it becomes possible to 
gain the world without losing the soul, to secure the 
world without sacrificing the self. The fate of the sub- 
jective is one with the destiny of the objective; indeed, 
as the idea of the world becomes clearer and more con- 
vincing, the truth of the self becomes more plausible and 
perfect. Would one attempt to argue that, when the 
world-idea in the mind of man was weak, the self-idea 
was correspondingly strong, and that because the self- 
idea encountered no opposition from without? With 
the primitive man, where there is little comprehension 
of the facts and forces of the exterior world, there is 
just as little appreciation of the inner life; physics 
and psychology are equally imperfect. But, when the 
knowledge of the world becomes more perfect, the 
affairs of the self grow brighter, since it is the perfected 
and not the primitive condition of culture which wit- 
nesses the appearance of both the world-idea and the 
self-idea. The correction of that solipsism which seems 
to threaten the existence of the exterior world, is to be 
found not in less but in more of the self-idea ; when 
this is extended an extra diameter, the self tends to 
become coincident with the world. 

3. Individualism and Nominalism 

Just as there has been a misunderstanding between 
the self and the world, so there has been a pathetic lack 
of agreement between the self and society. The egoist 
has refused to be considered a thing among things; he 
has opposed the attempt to make him a mere " cell in the 
social organism." The success of social thinking in its 
systematic attempt to round out a social order compar- 
able to the physical world, has been due to that constant 
violation of the self's inner content for which the social 
thinker is famous. As a result of such generalizing, 
social thought has entertained a conception of the self 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 529 

which is practically worthless. The " individual " of 
social science is so wanting in power and character that 
the social thinker has had no difficulty in casting the 
net about him. The history of the nineteenth century 
thus witnessed a peculiar and distressing condition of 
human affairs. On the one side, scientific thought 
treated the self in such a formal manner that the result- 
ant idea could never be a factor in the adjustment of 
the ego to the social order. On the other hand, the 
elaboration of a content of life for the individual was 
carried on almost exclusively by the aesthetic thinker, 
who succeeded in developing a rich content of soul- 
stuff, but that with so little in the way of formal descrip- 
tion that the admirer of individualism was unable to 
discover what being one's self really meant. To the 
question, " How ? " the egoist could give no essential 
answer. Upon the philosophic side, where form and 
content are supposed to be discussed together, there were 
few who took up the individualistic problem; so that all 
one heard was the nay of science and the yea of art. 
Among the philosophical egoists of the period in ques- 
tion were Emerson and Stirner, neither of whom could 
boast an independent dialectic ; both of these contended 
for the self by making an appeal to the old nominalism. 
Mediaeval methods are not to be despised simply be- 
cause they are mediaeval, so that, if the old contrast 
between particular and universal, as this appeared in 
the scholastic opposition between nominalism and real- 
ism, seems serviceable, the problem of the self may well 
be conducted along nominalistic lines. Both parties in 
the conflict are candidates for the truth ; upon which 
side will truth throw its favor; which of the two, the 
individual or the universal, shall wear the girdle of 
grace and truth? The competition between the self and 
society carries with it the contrast between content and 
form. Upon the individualistic side, it can hardly be 



53Q 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



denied that an individualized inner life, devoted to joy, 
worth, and truth, is in a position to develop a life-content 
unknown in the vast and impersonal order. Individual- 
ism is intensive where social thought is extensive. On 
the other hand, it is the social order which is in a posi- 
tion to perfect the form of humanity. Now everybody 
knows that form and content must go together, just as 
everybody realizes that humanity must be made up of 
the individual and the social taken together; but the 
recognition of such formal truths is by no means the 
same as the solution of the practical problem proposed 
by the antinomy of selfhood and society. The relation 
of the self to nature is wholly theoretical, since the self 
cannot change the natural order of physical things, but 
must rest content with acceptable ideas concerning the 
ego and the world; but, with the self and society, both 
factors are subject to change, since the self can act upon 
its social environment, just as the social order can mould 
the individual. For this reason, the adjustment of the 
two members must be carried on with critical care. 
Combinations of complementary colors may be made in 
such a way as to bring about either mutual assistance or 
complete neutralization. The actual situation is such 
that to-day most men are denied individual existence, 
while some are in an anti-social condition. 

In dealing with particulars which thought seeks to 
render intelligible, the most natural thing to do is to 
unite them in the form of a generalization. In this 
manner, trees and animals are easily assembled under 
as many convenient heads, so that the particular is now 
found in the general. Where, in other departments 
of contemporary thought, there is downright prejudice 
against the generalization, in social thinking the con- 
ceptual general has been allowed full sway. On the 
whole, it may be said, all physical generalization is 
blamed, all social generalization is praised. Were not 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 531 

this the tendency, it had been impossible for the social 
thinker to perfect the general which is now so current 
and authoritative in the form of " society." Things, 
which could not complain of the generalizing treatment, 
have escaped ; persons have not been so fortunate. Evo- 
lution has had the effect of neutralizing the animalistic 
concept without working so satisfactorily in behalf of 
the humanistic one; thus, when Darwinism discusses 
man as a species, it opens the conceptual circle upon the 
lower side, whence the lower animal participates in the 
life of man, but closes it on the higher side, where the 
individual would break out into free individualism. 
Biologically viewed, the generalization, man, is loose; 
on the ethical side, it is so tight that the individual is 
threatened with solidarity. In all this, there is formal 
inconsistency which puzzles the mind of the disinterested 
thinker; furthermore, there is, in such reasoning, an 
ethical injustice that is sure to offend the conscious indi- 
vidual. If the lower animal may enter into the circle 
of mankind, why may not the higher human being pass 
out? 

Generalization is always questionable, inasmuch as it 
must involve a process of abstraction in connection with 
which the most characteristic qualities of the individual 
thing are eliminated. As metal, gold is not yellow; as 
tree, the branches of the poplar do not shoot up; as 
plant, the rose is not red. The thing in its characteristic 
particularity must pay dearly for its initiation into the 
circle of the general. When the humanistic general- 
ization is made, the individual is called upon to relin- 
quish that which is most characteristic and precious, 
whence generalization becomes a process of dubious 
value. When mankind is thus massed in the concept, 
what byway of aesthetical or ethical content can the 
individual call his own? Only the most obvious and 
commonplace may come in for recognition; for which 

34 



532 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

reason the " man " of social speculation and economic 
calculation is a poor imitation of the self-conscious, self- 
willed ego. If science demands such sacrifices, it is not 
to be wondered at that the individualist is often ready 
to fling himself into the arms of a hearty irrationalism. 

But generalization were not so bad for the human 
self if the concept " man " merely stood off to one side 
in contrast with the living individual; this, however, is 
not the attitude of the concept at all. The place that 
the concept assumes is a superior one, since it takes its 
position above the particular thing or person, which 
latter must consent to subordination. Under the deep 
shadow of the general notion, the individual fades and 
droops. Any conceptual generalization which seeks to 
overshadow the striving suffering individual, is bound 
to be injurious; so that men are wont to worship the 
idea of something that refuses classification, whence the 
Hindu declares, " Brahman is that which is," while the 
Hebrew made his Jahveh say, " I am that I am." In 
the case of the human ego, the general ills of subordi- 
nation are made unusually bad by the scientific attempt 
to subsume the self under the social concept. When 
this formal notion of logic is duly comprehended, it 
can more easily be seen why the egoist insisted upon an 
inward joy which should not flow out into the conceptual 
general of man as animal, why he asserted free initia- 
tives which should express themselves as the general 
work of the social order, and why he resorted to an 
irrationalism which should redeem him from all classi- 
fication. If there is to be any synthesis of the self and 
the human order, it must consist of some kind of synec- 
doche according to which the individual relates to the 
species as the species relates to the individual. 

Nominalistic egoism, which has ever been ready to 
appeal to the irrational in life, has thus suffered from 
the smooth processes of generalization and subordina- 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOEE 533 

tion. Along with these, one notes the logical work of 
predication by means of which things in general are 
defined, but through whose influence the human self is 
fettered. It was against such invidious predication that 
egoism protested, as was observed in the section, The 
Struggle for the Truth of Life. The passion for predi- 
cation, which has often connected things with impos- 
sible attributes, has had the effect of linking the indi- 
vidual with an array of adjectival qualities whose effect 
has been to discolor the inner life of the individual. 
As splendid statues gain nothing when they are painted, 
so the ego is no better but worse off when social think- 
ing attempts to attribute to it a series of scientific and 
social qualities which the acute thinker has been able to 
ferret out of the life of man in the world of sense. To 
mention this general tendency to predicate as witnessed 
in scientific-social thinking is to recall how the form of 
the free individual has been colored by attributes pecu- 
liar to heredity and environment, by adjectives racial 
and climatic, eugenic and hygienic. In the midst of 
this performance, which has been more foolish than 
false, the individual has shown himself to be thoroughly 
human, since " a man's a man for a' that." If the ego 
were but a thing among things, the work of predi- 
cation might go on undisturbed, but it is of the very 
genius of individualism to assert the ego, in spite of 
the qualifying limitations which a heedless science tends 
to drape about him. 

Individualism has shown what qualities may be at- 
tached to the human self as subject. Individualism has 
asserted that man must be viewed in such a manner as 
to include a system of soul-states which the individual 
enjoys and through which he realizes himself. In addi- 
tion to such eudaemonism, the individualistic demand 
includes the freedom of initiative in conjunction with 
which the self says, "I will," in the light of which it 



534 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



takes up its own work in the world. Finally, the joy 
and worth of life are accompanied by an inner sense 
of truth, which the individual refuses to confine to mere 
things, but which he would apply to himself also. These 
are phases of that living content which individualism 
would now employ as so many predicates of man as 
such. If there be no place for such a self in the social 
order, then the ego must either proceed in anti-social 
manner, or recast the conception of social existence in 
such a manner as to make a characteristic generalization 
possible. To apply purely social characteristics to the 
self is to lose the subject in the predicate. 

If the elaboration of a humanistic generalization is 
more difficult than is the case with other concepts, 
the very difficulty involved may make the solution cor- 
respondingly easy. In the case of the plant, the inclu- 
sion of the particular under the head of the general 
proceeds in a satisfactory manner, since the particular- 
ity of the plant betokens no inward individuality; the 
same may be said of the animal, where the principle of 
individuation has no essential meaning to the creature 
involved in it. But, in the case of man, the particular 
and individuated have taken special forms, which the 
self expresses after the manner of an " I am," " I will," 
" I think." For this reason, individuation must receive 
special treatment. On the other hand, the synthesis of 
human individuals in the form of a social generalization 
has the effect of yielding something more than a corre- 
sponding generalization of plants and animals could 
yield. The human generalization produces the idea of 
" humanity." But this was just the result of that indi- 
vidualism which at first seemed so inimical to the social. 
From all of this, what follows ? The more perfect the 
individuation, the more perfect the humanity ; the more 
perfect the socialization, the nearer the approach to 
humanity. That is, both the self and society have some- 
thing in common; it is the ideal of humanity. 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 535 

At heart, the true aim of all individualism has not 
been the development of the self as such, else were all 
individualism a merely hedonic egoism; individualism 
has aimed at the humanity of the self, as this appeared 
in soul-states, free initiatives, and inward assertions. 
On the other side of the case, it may be said that all 
social thinking, however crass it has often been, has had 
no other desire than the perfection of that humanity 
which to the social thinker seemed to lie implicit in the 
social order. Perhaps one has failed as much as the 
other; perhaps the intensive humanism of the individ- 
ualist has been as remiss as the extensive humanism of 
the social thinker; nevertheless, the idea of humanity 
has not been wholly overlooked in the two-fold opera- 
tion. In the higher synthesis of the self and the world, 
the presence of humanity must come in for special note. 
When the synthetic method is employed, the old diremp- 
tion should disappear. Formerly, the disjunction in- 
volved seemed to consist of but two members, the indi- 
vidual and the social; now it appears that there are 
three. As a result of this new situation, one is not 
called upon to choose between the egoistic and the 
social, for he may choose the human ; hence, he who 
approaches the problem of life from the social side may 
make his own way toward a supreme humanity, while 
he who entertains the egoistic prejudice is in a position 
where he may see the realization of his ideals in the 
same notion. 

By virtue of the participation of the self in humanity, 
the old difficulties peculiar to subsumption and predi- 
cation fall away. That to which the egoist objected 
when the elaboration of the concept society was carried 
on, was the subordination of the self to the social gen- 
eralization. In this mariner, the egoistic assertion, " I 
am," was made to read, " I am a social being," just as ' 
one would say, " the dog is an animal." As now viewed, 



536 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

the egoist may relegate himself to a concept in such a 
manner as to say, "lama human being," which asser- 
tion is scarcely calculated to arouse egoistic animosity. 
The same principle applies to the problem of predica- 
tion, so that, where once ethics sought to apply the 
adjective " social " to the subject man, it is now called 
upon to employ the humanistic predicate. The idea 
of humanity contains implicitly all that " individual " 
sought to make explicit in its contention for the life- 
content of joy, worth, and truth. At the same time, the 
notion of " humanity " belongs to the individual just as 
thoroughly as it pertains to society, and that because 
humanity is made up of both form and content, just as 
it is extensive and intensive. 

II. KNOWLEDGE AS INTELLECTUAL LIFE 

Since the individual has shown his ability and will- 
ingness to transcend his one-time solipsism and nomi- 
nalism, it remains to be seen whether knowledge as such 
is in a position to rise above its traditional prejudices in 
such a way and to such a degree as shall make possible 
the higher synthesis of the knowing self and the known 
world. The ego as enjoyer was able to mate with the 
idea of enjoyment as such, and the self as worker was 
none the less capable of uniting with the ideal of world- 
work; why, then, should there not be a possible union 
of the self as knower and the principles of knowledge? 
The particular interpretation of knowledge which seems 
necessary for the desired reconciliation of the two par- 
ties expresses itself in the form of the caption, " Knowl- 
edge as intellectual life." In the history of modern 
epistemology, such a conception, while here and there it 
may have been implicit in the discussion, has never been 
brought to the foreground; on the contrary, theory of 
knowledge has spent its time and its force seeking to 
discover whether knowledge should consist in some kind 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 537 

of perceiving from without or some sort of conceiving 
within. Here, it has been a contention in favor of 
knowledge after experience ; there, for knowledge before 
experience; the possibility of knowledge in experience 
has been allowed to fall between two stools. Mean- 
while the actual process of knowing the world has gone 
on in art and science, in religion and general life, so 
that the lack of adequate theory has been felt more by 
the theorizer than by the man who has sought simply 
to know. The knowledge which actual knowing has 
involved seems to consist of an intellectual life. 

1. The Understanding as Human 

All discussions of the " human understanding " must 
be at once human and rational ; the old rationalism with- 
out humanism was as misleading as the neo-humanism 
without rationalism. In the same manner, the old em- 
piricism was as careless of man the experiencer as neo- 
realism has been negligent of man the perceiver. To 
sustain a balance of man and mind is far from easy, 
perhaps ; yet one can aim to make the humanistic ra- 
tional, the rationalistic human. The traditional schools 
of epistemology, from whose influence we need try to 
rid our minds, were both guilty of what, for want of a 
better term, may be called " ideology." Both indulged 
in the academic idea of man thinking when the subject 
in question is also man living. Knowledge is indeed an 
analytical operation in accordance with which isolated 
ideas have their place and exert their influence; at the 
same time, knowledge is a kind of culture whose syn- 
thetic creations have had at least much to do with the 
history of humanity as has the ideological. 

To indulge the ideological, which makes all thinking 
appear direct and clear-cut, is to make man live in his 
mind alone ; other interests, like the aesthetical, ethical, 
and religious, come by courtesy only. From the stand- 



538 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

point of rationalism, man was expected to live in his 
ideas, while empiricism was just as insistent upon the 
point that man must live in the things that he perceives. 
How much intellectual life as life and what kind of 
human culture the realization of this notion would have 
produced, is difficult to determine; but it is well to 
observe that the intellectual operations of the human 
spirit have been carried on in delightful ignorance of 
the great decisions which were being made by the 
authoritarian epistemologists. In the last analysis, all 
epistemological knowledge was a knowledge of ideas, 
whether these were evoked freely from within or elab- 
orated more toilingly from without. In neither case 
was the individual knower able to live in the world and 
thus become acquainted with it naturally; rather was 
he forced to abandon the self and turn to things or flee 
from things and give himself to thoughts. Now think- 
ing thoughts and perceiving things are poor substitutes 
for living an intellectual life in the world. 

An empiricist like Locke, even when his thought was 
free from the bombast of Bacon, did far less for nature 
than empiricists have imagined; a rationalist like Kant 
was just about as ineffectual in doing something for the 
individual, whose understanding was made to appear so 
magisterial. The self-constituted world on the one side 
and the self -asserting ego on the other were forced to 
look after their own affairs when they realized that the- 
ories of knowledge had not kept their promises. The 
empiricist seeks to make the world all by making the 
mind nothing; viewed as a tabula rasa, the mind must 
humbly accept what the world of things may choose 
to give it. The rationalist matched this extraordinary 
thesis with one of his own, according to which the mind 
is all, the world nought ; all that the exterior order .can 
ever hope to become depends upon the dictate of the 
a priori understanding of man. Here, the mind can 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOEE 539 

anticipate nothing; there, it anticipates every possible 
perception of reality. In spite of the fact that thinkers 
like Locke and Kant seem to be at such swords' points, 
they are finally forced to admit that, instead of dealing 
with genuine knowledge of the world by the self, they 
are only speaking of "ideas"; both end in ideology; 
both fail to discover the principles of intellectual life; 
both shun the plain question, " What is truth ? " 

In the special case of the Kantian epistemology, which 
now seems to represent the general situation, the phi- 
losopher out-Pilates Pilate. Feeling that he was pos- 
sessed of morality as a sort of fourth dimension, Kant 
seems to have indulged the notion that, when the world 
of thought became too complicated, he could make his 
ethical escape from the six sides of thought; it was in 
this spirit that he indulged his grim humor at the ex- 
pense of truth. In the mind of this moralic transcen- 
dentalism "the land of truth — das Land der Wahr- 
heit," is indeed a charming land, but one removed from 
the experience of man and screened from his vision. 
Far off in the stormy sea and surrounded by cloud- 
bank, the land of truth allures the hapless mariner to 
discover that which he is destined never to know. 2 
This touch of Teutonic Sturm und Drang makes inter- 
esting reading; but does it really represent the specu- 
lative situation? Columbus must discover the western 
continent, but not so the eastern one; perhaps the mind 
of man is already in possession of that which it seeks 
to know. 

If man does not live in the land of truth, where does 
he make his home? If knowledge is a knowledge of 
ideas rather than of things, how is the origin of these 
mysterious ideas to be explained? Those who cling to 
the history of modern philosophy and that with the feel- 
ing that, in general, the thinkers there were not wholly 

* Critique, tr. Miiller, 205. 



540 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



mistaken, are often at a loss to know just what to do 
with these extraordinary epistemologies. If one must 
" destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith," 
if one must relinquish truth for the sake of thinkable 
ideas, he feels that epistemology is far too expensive for 
the philosophic pocket. As Locke's epistemology began 
with nothing, Kant's ended in nothing, so that nihilistic 
ideology seems to be the fate in store for him who fol- 
lows traditional theory. What wonder that individual- 
ism has been so ready to accept and employ a frank 
irrationalism. When the logical ideal of truth as the 
correspondence of thought and thing was changed to the 
coherence of thought and thought, the attractiveness and 
worth of that truth seem to have lost their meaning. 
It is all very well to believe that reality consists of the 
causal connection of things without, and that truth in- 
volves the rational relation of thoughts within ; but such 
dualism disappoints him who would view the world as 
intelligible, the mind as real. That which knowledge 
endeavors to establish as its general proposition is, 
" The mind knows the world." However naive such 
an assumption, something like this has been the under- 
lying principle of all real knowing in the realms of 
science and culture. 

In striking contrast with such forbidding ideology, we 
are called upon to observe the operations which a living 
intellectualism has carried on in the mind's attempt to 
reduce the things of the world to order. Thus it must 
be quite plain to the disinterested observer that some 
other than the ideological principle of knowing ideas 
has been the support and inspiration of the knowing 
mind in its culture of the world. In more than one 
way, ideology was of value in pointing out that ideas 
have their place in the art of knowing things, hence all 
who take another than an ideological point of view must 
exercise care lest they make knowledge to consist of an 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 541 

operation in which ideas have no part at all. Thus, it 
is not sufficient that the ratio essendi is a bland know- 
ing of things apart from ideas, or that the ratio cogno- 
scendi of truth is something purely humanistic when the 
ideational is one of the most characteristic of human 
attributes. Things are not merely things, men are not 
merely men. At the same time, the idea, which seems 
to be equally favorable to both thought and thing, may 
be of service in explaining the agreement of inner with 
outer, of outer with inner. Perhaps then it may be said 
that the spirit of modern ideology was just, so that it 
is only the severely academic method of procedure that 
one should seek to criticize. 

The veritable situation as presented by living knowl- 
edge appears to be one according to which the mind is 
within the world in whose life and nature it has ever 
been participating. Growing up in the world, man has 
sought to become acquainted with its forms and func- 
tions ; man is not as one without who tries to gain an 
entrance into the charmed circle of its forms and truths; 
rather is he within the system of existence to which 
he owes his origin. Nor is the world outside of man 
making it necessary for his mind to wait for experience 
to acquaint him with its realities; on the contrary, the 
spirit of the world characterizes man's nature in such 
a manner as to make knowledge of reality native to him. 
Man in the world and the world in man, that seems to 
be the most natural idea which confronts one when he 
attempts to present the question of human knowledge. 

The intellectualistic presentation of the knowledge- 
situation would indulge the thought that what we have 
to explain is an intellectual life striving to acquaint itself 
with its world, rather than that of an alien mind attempt- 
ing to discover the world, or a foreign world using sen- 
sation to effect an entrance into the mind. As an intel- 
lectual life, the inner nature and activity of reason be- 



542 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



comes far more comprehensible than it has been under 
the auspices of either empiricism or rationalism. The 
real intellect of man is not an experience-registering or 
a category- functioning affair, but an intellectual life 
growing up into a knowledge of the world within and 
without it. Such an intellectual life expresses itself in 
culture rather than in calculation, whether that calcu- 
lation be of an empirical or a rationalistic sort. Is it 
not possible, then, to consider human philosophical 
knowledge as a cosmic culture, or an attempt to secure 
living knowledge of the world as a whole? If mind 
is a tabula rasa, if the world is a terra incognita, then 
the attempt to secure knowledge of reality can end in 
nothing more than a knowledge of ideas ; but if a living 
mind seeks to acquaint itself with the world in which 
it is placed, there is some chance of that mind's gaining 
a knowledge of truth. Furthermore, something like 
knowledge of truth has been gained by the mind; shall 
we be so skeptical of our human culture as to insist that 
such knowledge is but a knowledge of ideas? 

2. The Origin and Ground of Knowledge 

The conception of knowledge as an intellectual life 
within the world, rather than of an intellect placed out- 
side reality, aids us in considering the modern question 
concerning the origin of knowledge. Locke's scruple 
was so great that he could not allow the mind as such 
to possess any innate ideas ; Kant's anxiety for the mind 
was so great that he found it necessary to place all 
possible knowledge within the understanding. Which 
was right, Locke or Kant : which was the right point 
of view, that which premised nothing, or that which 
premised everything? If there was no knowledge in 
the mind at the beginning, how was it possible for the 
mind to acquire its knowledge? If all knowledge was 
originally in the understanding, how was it possible to 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 543 

make the acquisition of knowledge genuine? Empiricism 
cannot convince us of the possibility, dogmatism cannot 
reveal to us the need, of knowledge ; in one case, the 
mind has everything to learn, in the other nothing. In 
the midst of this modern dispute between the two 
schools, it has been overlooked that the mind has in its 
own way acquired truths, religious and artistic ones at 
the beginning, philosophic and scientific ones as it ad- 
vanced; how is this actual knowledge, this human cul- 
ture, to be explained? In addition to such general 
knowledge which has instructed the mind and nourished 
the soul, the intellect has not failed to develop a special 
form of world-knowledge in metaphysics ; has this sci- 
ence been dependent upon the theory of knowledge? 
According to Kant, it was necessary to know the pos- 
sibilities of the mind before one could know the realities 
of the world; but the actual situation seems to be one 
in which the question of knowledge as such, instead of 
standing apart as the judge of that which should be 
considered real, was itself involved in the larger ques- 
tion of knowledge, as where, with Parmenides and 
Plato, knowing and being were one. Where the ancient 
thinker would place knowledge and reality upon the 
same basis, the modern has sought to assume the primary 
position for knowing, the secondary for being. 

The origin of knowledge, whether in the general, cul- 
tural, or the special, metaphysical, form seems to be 
neither within nor without the mind; the views of both 
empiricism and rationalism appear equally hopeless. The 
solution of this paradox seems to be found in the thought 
which we are now indulging; namely, that knowledge 
is not a mere knowing, but an intellectual life, that 
knowledge is not acquired from a position without the 
world as a kind of discovery, but within the world as an 
acquaintance. Concerning the sensation-recording mind 
of Locke and the category-functioning mind of Kant, 



544 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

we can simply say that such a "mind" does not exist. 
Such a "mind" which seeks reality in the one case and 
is sought by reality in the other, is a fiction ; mind, as 
we know it through its acquisition of knowledge and its 
inward culture, is something which lives and works 
within the world. Mind is not below the world, not 
above the world; mind is neither transcended by reality r 
nor does it itself transcend reality; mind is in reality. 
Both empiricism and rationalism confuse us with their 
question concerning the origin of ideas, because they per- 
sist in placing the mind in a position outside the world; 
once there, the mind has no hope of coming into its- 
kingdom, whether from below or from above. 

With the thought of mind as an intellectual life, a 
life which is responsible for art and religion as well as 
for science and metaphysics, we are in a position where 
we may safely handle the question concerning the abso- 
lutism and relativism of knowledge. Where empiricism 
places mind below the world and makes its ideas depend- 
ent upon sensation, knowledge can never be more than 
a relative knowledge; where rationalism lifts the under- 
standing to a position beyond the world, all knowledge 
must be absolutistic. But, where knowledge is an intel- 
lectual life, the question of absolutism and relativism 
loses much of its meaning, whence we are able to affirm 
that neither situation presents the real position of the 
mind in the world. There is indeed something absolutis- 
tic in the thought that the human mind within the world' 
occupies a central position, whence none of its dignity 
is lost to it from its non-rationalistic origin. In the same 
manner, there is something relativistic about the mind, 
for the reason that, while in its central position, it must 
recognize that the periphery of the world lies beyond it, 
so that its knowledge is a growing and becoming. The 
mind is not placed in a position where it must pronounce 
a kind of "all or nought" ; the living mind in the world 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 545 

shows itself to be in possession of knowledge which 
gradually becomes clearer and more perfect, whence 
knowledge partakes more of the nature of culture than 
of thought. 

While it is only in a general way that we may insist 
upon the absolutism of knowledge, the truth inherent in 
the idea of the absolutistic still obtains in the form of 
the supremacy and dignity of the knowing process. In 
a certain sense, there is nothing extraordinary about 
knowledge, while at the same time there is nothing to 
be compared with the relation between the knower and 
the known unless we cite the instance of the will and its 
object. These two forms of mental expression, the in- 
tellectualistic and the voluntaristic, cannot be compared 
with other things which take place in the world ; indeed, 
as a matter of fact, knowing and doing are not to be 
called events. The view of knowledge as an intellectual 
life within the world would express the relation between 
knowledge and its object, not by placing the two side 
by side in the form of a parallelism, but by adjusting 
the knower to a central position within the circle of that 
which is to be known. Just why the knowing process is 
thus placed within the world of knowledge rather than 
outside and alongside of it, can be answered only by 
saying that that is where the mind is found; for it is 
only an artificial dualism which, having first extracted 
the mind from the world, attempts to range the knowing 
process parallel with that which it is expected to know. 
The naturalness of knowledge and the spontaneity of 
human culture indicate that it is not necessary to inflict 
upon the mind sensations from without, not necessary 
to endow the mind with inexplicable categories to be 
inflicted upon the world from within. 

Intellectual life concerns itself with knowledge rather 
than the theory of knowledge; its categorical impera- 
tive is, I must know! Does subjectivism make knowl- 



546 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

edge possible? In opposition to subjectivism, it may be 
urged that, not only does it deny us the right to possess 
our world, but it takes our selfhood from us ; in place 
of "I am" and "I known," it puts a mere "I perceive," 
or an "I think:" It is, of course, possible for the sub- 
jectivist to insist that there can be no attempt at knowl- 
edge of the outer world which does not make due allow- 
ance for the fact that such knowledge must come to 
the mind in the form of subjective impression or inward 
thought; but such attempts at idealization have the ef- 
fect of defeating themselves, inasmuch as they hide 
from us the reality within as well as the reality with- 
out the mind, just as Kant's Second Antinomy is as fatal 
to the soul as the First Antinomy is to the world. On 
this account, it becomes necessary for the individualist to 
deny himself the friendship and furtherance of idealism 
whose perceptual and conceptual forms are impotent to 
assert the independent existence of the self with its inner 
life of culture. It is not something less than such ideal- 
ism, but something more, which is required to content 
the ambitions of the mind as intellectual life. The abid- 
ing truth of idealism peculiar as it is to both Plato and 
Kant, consists in the assertion that mind is equal to the 
problem of knowledge, inasmuch as mind is itself pos- 
sessed of the intellectual forms and functions which true 
knowledge involves. With Plato and Kant, this truth 
is expressed in the form of the mind's power to "antici- 
pate" knowledge, although with Kant this anticipation 
was urged to such an extreme that the transcendentalist 
assumed the position that the fundamental forms of 
reality could be known from a study of the mind alone, 
as in the instances of the quantitative, qualitative, casual, 
and substantial. 

Yet, such an "anticipation" of experience, essential 
as it is to intellectual life, may be expressed in a less 
questionable form when, instead of removing from 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOLE 547 

knowledge the natural element of surprise, we change 
the emphasis to the sufficiency of the mind to the task 
which the world presents. When realism strives to view 
the mind as a naive view of a world with which mind 
is expected to have no affinity, it makes it difficult to 
see how mind can become acquainted with what is so 
alien as the world, while it further complicates the nat- 
ural knowing of the world by the suggestion that mind 
is wholly unprepared for its work as knower of the 
world. In addition to the fixed forms of knowledge by 
which, according to Kant, the mind was supposed to 
have a ready place for the manifold of reality, the mind 
is equipped with a native love of knowledge, amor intel- 
lectualis, while the instinctive desire for happiness is 
such as to remain unsatisfied apart from an intellectual 
participation in the world. It is in such intellectualistic 
eudaemonism that the mind reveals itself as intellectual 
life able not only to reflect and react upon the world, 
but prepared to enjoy existence through the knowledge 
of that which is. Such a desire for intellectual enjoy- 
ment is equivalent to the idea of anticipation, while it 
makes none of the specific assertions which rendered 
Kant's epistemology so forbidding. The mind is adapted 
to the knowledge of reality, for in that knowledge the 
functions of the mind have their true exercise; enjoying, 
working, and comprehending the world — these are the 
specific forms of intellectual life. 

The living enjoyment of knowledge, the use and 
realization of the intellect as intellectual life, make the 
usual criteria of knowledge seem indirect and hesitating. 
Where ancient thought was wont to maintain the cor- 
respondence of thought and thing, modern epistemology 
has found it necessary to advocate a parellelism accord- 
ing to which the coherence of ideas within has been sup- 
posed to accompany the coherent order of things with- 
out. With the method of correspondence, there was 



S4 8 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

always the suggestion that the objective world was more 
authentic than the inner life, to which was accorded 
such functions as "imitation" of and "participation" in 
the real order of things ; in the case of "coherence," the 
tendency was toward the subjective, as the philosophies 
of Malebranche, Berkeley, and Kant attest. Of the two 
ideals of knowledge, that of correspondence seems more 
authentic, for the idea of coherence suggests that, after 
all, it is the correspondence of the whole coherent order 
within to the coherent order without which constitutes 
the idea of truth. From the viewpoint of intellectual 
life within the world, the idea of correspondence is sup- 
planted by the notion of a living participation of the 
subject with the object, the subject can be satisfied only 
as it goes forth from itself into the living world of 
things. In the same manner, the ideal of inner coher- 
ence cannot satisfy the mind, which longs for a more 
vital apprehension of the world than the perfect order 
and connection of its inner ideas can supply. The mind 
desires a sense of intellectual enjoyment which must 
mean more than the satisfaction which might come from 
witnessing the consistent play of ideas with the mind. 
Indeed, the idea of inward coherence was never wholly 
free from the morbidness and irrationalism from which 
the individualism of the future is bound to deliver itself. 
Just as the conception of knowledge as intellectual life 
delivers the self from merely formal criteria of truth, 
so the living view of truth makes it possible for the 
mind to adopt a more satisfactory attitude toward the 
given form of the world. This form is that of change 
and becoming. With both ancient and modern idealism, 
with Plato and Spinoza, no knowledge seemed possible 
in a world of change and progress, so that the rationalist 
has ever been as a monarch who would command the 
sea to stand still. But, if the element of permanence 
is found in the mind, which may view its world sub spe- 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 549 

cie aeternitatis, there is no need of having the object of 
the knowledge as something fixed. The idea of fixity 
in knowledge seems to have sprung from a false con- 
ception of reality, whence the thinker has been led to 
expect of existence that of which existence was not capa- 
ble. The rationalist who postulates permanence as the 
essential of knowledge is prone to consider reality as 
constituted by a thing-in-itself, when the most consistent 
and promising conception of reality makes room for 
the qualities of the thing and the states of its being. It 
is undeniable that such qualities and states are not pos- 
sessed of unlimited freedom, for they move and vary 
in accordance with the nature of the thing which they 
constitute; but, within their proper sphere, they are 
privileged to come and go as they are worked upon by 
the principle of change. The known reality of the thing 
then is discoverable in the principle which synthesizes 
the states of existence; this principle of order makes 
possible all the change of which the thing is capable. 

Because of the plastic conception of reality, it may 
be said that, not only does knowledge permit of motion 
in its object, but knowledge actually demands such mo- 
tion as the condition under which it is able to do its 
synthetic work. Because of the plastic and at times 
unorganized condition of the object of knowledge, the 
mind is able to do genuine thought-work, which were 
impossible if the object were a fixed thing-in-itself. In 
the case of perception, the synthetic act of knowledge 
is made possible by the heterogeneous character of the 
qualities involved in the transaction, for perception is a 
fusion of states under the head of objectivity. To per- 
ceive such an object as an apple, is to assemble and 
unite such divergent qualities as red color, sweet taste, 
smooth tactual quality, spicy odor, and the like. The 
work of perception is thus done in the midst of a chang- 
ing manifold of sensations. The same may be said of 



550 THE GROUND AND GOAL, OF HUMAN LIFE 

conception; here, the various examples which make up 
the general idea are possessed of considerable differences 
with but a minimum of likeness, so that the understand- 
ing is called upon to exert itself in order to unite these 
different things under one head. Were there no differ- 
entiations, were there no changes, it were difficult to 
comprehend how the mind could do its work of thought. 
The mental permanence which the mind so desires is a 
condition acquired in the midst of difference and change. 
In this manner, the dialectic of Parmenides seems weak 
and ineffectual because it fails to yield one iota to the 
Heraclitean flux, in which the challenge to the mind was 
such as to evoke the genuine synthetic powers of thought. 
In the case of the more advanced and richer dialectic 
of Plato, the significance of the Heraclitean confusion 
was not thoroughly appreciated; Heraclitus was the 
friendly foe who made possible the deduction of the 
very Idea which his philosophy seemed to forbid. With 
the skeptical Hume, Kant was more liberal than were 
these ancient masters with their adversaries ; yet, even 
with Kant, who was pledged to the synthetic in knowl- 
edge, there was the desire to subdue the outer world to 
the inner life, rather than to allow the subject to weave 
knowledge out of the threads of sensation. Now it is as 
weaving rather than as moulding that knowledge is to 
be understood. 

Knowledge is at once desiderative and dialectical; 
viewed as intellectual life, knowledge is an intense long- 
ing for truth rather than a mere acceptance of it as 
something imposed upon the mind from without. The 
desire to know is in many ways as important as the abil- 
ity to know, so that one may not justly complain of his 
mental condition when he is poor in knowledge but rich 
in desire — des Wissens bar, dock des Wunches voll — 
inasmuch as intellectual desire carries with it the power 
to create ideas. In place of the search for knowledge 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 551 

which some, like Lessing, have prized more highly than 
the possession knowledge itself, intellectualism would 
exalt an intellectual life in which desire assumes a dia- 
lectical character, and from which spring the forms of 
knowledge which, while somewhat foreign to logic and 
ethics, do not fail to find their place and exert their influ- 
ence in art and religion. 

3. The; Object of Knowledge; 

Where individualistic thought looks upon knowledge, 
neither as an anticipation nor as an imitation in the 
world, but as an intellectual life within that world, it 
places itself in a position where it feels secure of its 
known object. Such intellectualistic individualism is 
certainly delivered from the question whether knowl- 
edge has an object, so that it need only inquire concern- 
ing the manifest nature of that object. Intellectualism, 
in the free sense of the present interpretation, does not 
assume to dictate the character of the knowable world; 
nevertheless, intellectualism is able to render some de- 
cision concerning the contrary views of the world, as 
this world is an object of thought. The crux of the dif- 
ficulty is found in the opposed claims of the world as 
fixed and the world as fleeting, as this distinction has 
come down to our thought from the elder days of Par- 
menides and Heraclitus. Now it is well known that Soc- 
rates was annoyed by the subjectivism of Protagoras, 
just as Plato looked with dismay upon the impossibili- 
ties of Heraclitus. As a result, when the subjectivism 
of Protagoras seemed to fuse with the "flux" of Hera- 
clitus, Socrates and Plato decided upon a firm synthesis 
of all changing particulars under the head of the sub- 
stantial Ideas. In the epistemological thought of the 
day, there is a feeling that, perhaps, this classic synthe- 
sis was elaborated too hurriedly, too fixedly. Idealism 



552 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



clings to the old order of thinking, while realism seems 
ready to negate it altogether. 

From the standpoint of intellectualism, it seems ex- 
pedient to inquire concerning the relative values of the 
promises which the Heraclitean and Parmenidean hold 
out to the human mind. To the classic idealist, there 
was nothing in the Heraclitean, everything in the Par- 
menidean. The contention expressed itself in this man- 
ner: since conceptual knowledge demands a fixed ob- 
ject, it can do nothing but accept a view of the world 
as fixed, and reject a world- view which has in it nothing 
but change. As Socrates had repudiated the notion of 
every individual having his own subjective opinion, so 
Plato set at naught the claim that each changing thing, 
or phenomenon, of the manifold has, as it were, its own 
reality. The result was the Socratic Definition, the Pla- 
tonic Idea. Suppose, now, one return for a moment to 
the situation before the idealistic synthesis had fixed the 
ideas in the intellectual firmament; perhaps he may find 
something noteworthy and trustworthy in the Dionysian 
and Heraclitean. 

No little amount of logic depends upon what one ex- 
pects to find in reality; if, with dogmatism, he assumes 
that reality is indeed the Parmenidean estin-einai, he 
cannot find much encouragement in the Heraclitean-Pro- 
tagorean conception of knowledge as a knowledge of 
the varying particular. If, however, one sees in reality, 
not the substantial alone, but the qualitative and causal, 
also, he will find no less in Parmenides, and more in 
Heraclitus. According to this conception of reality, 3 
things do not exist apart from their qualities or actions. 
From this point of view, a thing is what it, in its phe- 
nomenalistic qualities, shows itself to be; a thing is 
what it does ; a thing is what it is. Thus, the substantial- 
istic in being, instead of coming forth at the beginning, 

s Cf . The Ego and its Place in the World. 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 553 

appears at the end of the dialectical search; for, as qual- 
ities cannot exist without appropriate causes, so causes 
cannot operate without the substantial ground afforded 
them by nothing else than substance itself. The world 
may not be of solid substance ; none the less is the world 
of qualities and causes of substantialistic character. 

This qualitative, causal conception of reality now be- 
comes of supreme value as the mind seeks its objective. 
Where the older substantialism of Parmenides and Plato 
protested that there could be no knowledge except as it 
was a kind of noiein-einai, wherein thinking and being 
were one, a more advanced and more critical substan- 
tialism finds it possible to apprehend the meaning of sub- 
stance in the changing manifold, in the caused qualities 
of a less rigid world. Indeed, with its firm belief in 
the substantial and the substantial's ability to guard its 
own ontological fortunes, intellectualism goes so far as 
to assert that it is not in spite of the changing manifold 
that substance persists, but by means of this very tend- 
ency in the world of things that substance is enabled to 
show to the mind just what it is. For, with a rich man- 
ifold of qualities, some of which, as in the case of com- 
plementary colors and opposed poles, could not be dis- 
played at the same metaphysical moment, the principle 
of change becomes necessary in the complete display of 
that which being is. Not all of the many, varied quali- 
ties can make their appearance at one time ; but, with 
the process of change within the domain of reality, the 
total revelation becomes possible. 

On the side of the mind, while the intellect reserves 
the right to pass final judgment, the function of sensa- 
tion is indispensable; for, without it, the content of be- 
ing would remain an empty thinghood, a Parmenidean 
estin-einai. The service of sensation cannot be lightly 
set aside by the superior intellect, even where the intel- 
lect has the authentic power to arrange the qualities of 



;54 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



sensation in appropriate groups whose totality will be- 
tray the meaning of reality in a manner unknown to the 
abstractness of the intellect or the concreteness of per- 
ception. In the same way, the will aids the intellect in 
affording intelligence concerning the dynamic character 
of the exterior object; and, while the will, like sensation, 
must ultimately submit to the intellect, the fact that doing 
is a step towards knowing cannot be dogmatically denied. 

If, now, as has been the case with dogmatism, knowl- 
edge is conceived of as standing outside the world, the 
concreteness and dynamic character of the world will 
never prove aught but a puzzle, a contradiction; but 
where the intellect is placed within the world where it 
had its origin, the significance of both sensation and 
volition cannot fail to appear. In the system of Heracli- 
tus, the promises of knowledge were thus more sincere 
than the idealist was able to see, for the reason that 
the idealist of the day was convinced that "to be" meant 
simply "to be." With Heraclitus, moreover, there was 
ever a sense of permanence, expressed as this was in 
his doctrine of the Logos. And it is as much the Herac- 
litean Logos as it is the Anaxagorean Nous, or even the 
Platonistic Idea, which intellectualism is ready to accept 
as the principle of knowledge upon which intellectual life 
is based. Intellectual life in the Logos, with all the phe- 
nomenalism and dynamism of the latter, is more to the 
individualist than the dogmatic rationalism which bases 
its claims to the interpretation of the world upon fixed 
concepts. 

In the midst of this contention that the qualitative, 
causal character of the world does not forbid knowledge, 
individualism further contends that idealism; which 
might be supposed to have nothing to learn from the 
world, has borne the burden of speculative thought, as 
this has been going on since the days of Vedanta and 
Greek philosophy. Apart from what has been the case, 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 555 

one might expect that a realistic system placing its af- 
fair upon the actual facts of the world, would have 
gathered the insight which has made philosophy what 
it is, while idealism could only stand aloof, offering now 
and then a criticism concerning the work of its more 
active colleague. History, however, has a different les- 
son to impart; from it we learn that it has been ideal- 
ism, with its indirect reference to the facts of experience, 
which has shaped the systems of philosophy; and real- 
ism has not been idle; its work has consisted in the sec- 
ondary activity of opposing generalizations, in challeng- 
ing conclusions. It has been from the intellectualistic 
conception of things as ideal that the individual has been 
able to evince the truth of life. 

III. THE INTELLECTUAL SYNTHESIS 

The third and final form of the higher synthesis which 
the reunion of the self and the world demands is an 
intellectual one, calculated to establish the truth of life. 
As genuine enjoyment makes possible the aesthetic syn- 
thesis, as genuine action perfects the practical synthesis, 
so a sincere conception of knowledge should bring self 
and world to a position of mutual understanding. That 
which the intellectual synthesis must confront is the 
individualistic attempt to evince the truth of life apart 
from any objective reference, the attempt which led 
to irrationalism and irreligion. The self with its ideals 
of inner existence makes demands which are not usually 
met in theories of knowledge, where objectivity is the 
most obvious criterion of truth. The foregoing discus- 
sion of The Truth of Life, where the self is the knower 
and the world the known, promises an ideal of knowledge 
which may be able to effect the reunion of the irrational 
self with the world, although it does not follow from 
this that the world may still be viewed as though it were 
purely scientific and social. To establish the reunion 



556 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of the self and the world, as these have been separated 
not by dialectics but by life itself, it becomes necessary 
to involve a deeper conception of both man and the 
world than contemporary thought is willing to allow ; 
furthermore, the ideal of knowledge must be refreshed 
by a new conception of the knowing process, which 
latter has hardly been able to raise itself above the dis- 
junction of rationalism and empiricism. The conception 
of knowledge which should reform subject and object, 
as well as the method of knowledge itself, is that of 
interpretation, the intellectual interpretation of the world 
as a whole. 

i. Knowledge as Interpretation 

Under the auspices of conventional systems of knowl- 
edge, the knowing process limited itself arbitrarily to the 
identification of things and the connection of causes in 
the world; that there might be an interpretation of the 
world as a whole was lost to view in the more technical 
and academic manner of considering the epistemological 
question. Such a method of knowledge, which involved 
a minor logic, had the effect of driving the individual 
out of the world, since the individual could not regard 
himself as a mere thing among things, or consider his 
inner life as something whose essence promised noth- 
ing more than a psycho-physical relation of mind and 
matter, or an epistemological distinction between sub- 
ject and object. In such a dualism, as also with the 
monism which was ever implicit in it, the relation of 
the self to the world failed to appear. The individual 
felt itself to be more than "mind" and somewhat dif- 
ferent from "subject," since these formal notions failed 
to express the content of an inner life appreciable in 
art, morality, and religion. But, with knowledge as an 
idealistic interpretation of the world as a whole, the 
individual has a right to expect that knowledge will 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORED-WHOLE 557 

have the effect of restoring the self to the world, the 
world to the self. What is expedient for the one may 
be accepted by the other. 

If such a conception of knowledge seems to involve 
a sort of transcendentalism, then it can only be pointed 
out that a philosophy of life, dissatisfied with the usual 
arrangement of the world in the form of ideas and 
things, has tacitly decided to rise above or descend below 
this, as the exigencies of the case might demand. If 
philosophy as such is content with the formal view, art, 
morality, and religion are not. Mystical thinking may 
assert, as in the case of Plotinus, that it is "beyond 
thinking and being," or may claim, as with Schelling, 
that the unity of subject and object is found in a lower 
realm of unconsciousness; all that philosophy of life de- 
sires to do is to interpret life in independence of aca- 
demic distinctions. Kant protested that his transcenden- 
talism did not pretend to arrive at the idea of pure 
thinghood; but this innocence of the transcendent is 
wanting in his ethics and aesthetics. That which was 
disallowed reason, was granted to will and sense; for 
Kant professes to find a superior good-in-itself and an 
equally superior beauty-in-itself where he cannot find 
a mental thing-in-itself. In this manner, Kant's moral- 
ity and art succeed where his logic fails. The present 
attempt at a higher synthesis of those functions of life 
which have to do with joy, worth, and truth, has pro- 
ceeded thus far with the result of showing that no extra- 
aesthetics is needed to satisfy the inward sense of beauty, 
which latter may well come to itself in complete aesthetic 
"harmony with the world and with humanity. In the 
same manner, it has been indicated that no over-ethical 
doctrine is needed to supply the demand for life's worth, 
since genuine human values may be established when 
man is one with nature and humanity. Have we not a 
right to expect as much complaisance from knowledge, 



558 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LJFE 

so that knowledge, instead of constituting a noble, indi- 
vidualistic irrationalism, shall take its place beside joy 
and worth in the world- whole of things and persons? 

To assert, as Scholasticism expressed it, that the idea 
in the mind is ante rem, is about the same as to affirm 
that the mind of the individual has the right to advance 
from the simple identification of the things of sense 
through their causal connection to an idealistic inter- 
pretation of the world as a whole. In a certain sense, 
this is transcendentalism ; yet the epistemology involved 
has less to say about any superior position that the mind 
might be conceived as occupying than about the exalted 
character which that mind may be supposed to possess. 
Below things of sense or beside them, mind might per- 
haps show its intrinsic intellectual worth ; but it seems 
as though the character of the mind were best conserved 
after the manner of an idealism which tends to place 
the idea above the sensuous object. In more ways than 
one, the transcendental logic of Kant achieved the goal 
of genuine knowledge, so that one may well wonder 
why Kant was so prone to despair of the results which 
the Kritik had achieved. When one rises above the ra- 
tionalism and empiricism of the Enlightenment, he finds 
it possible to forget whether the idea makes the thing 
or the thing the idea, since he sees that the idea is in a 
position to give the thing an idealistic interpretation. No 
longer is the question of, no object without subject or 
no subject without object, since object and subject so- 
called may lie down together like lamb and lion. 

The present system, which suggests a kind of hu- 
manistic intellectualism, is bound to feel no little sym- 
pathy for the old scheme of rationalism, since it wa3 
such a way of thinking as kept before the philosophical 
mind the idea of the individual's character and worth. 
In explaining the inward strivings of the mind as these 
exhibited themselves in the culture of humanity and' 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 559 

to justify those ideals which that culture perfected, the 
rationalistic conception of knowledge as pure cognition 
has been of inestimable value. Were one to assume that 
mind is content to think things either singly or in mutual 
relations, one would find it difficult to account for that 
world-old mental habit of thinking about ideas in their 
detachment from the things of sense-experience. Under 
such auspices, art were but imitation, aesthetic enjoy- 
ment naught but so much immediate pleasure. On the 
other hand, it is a question whether the individual is 
able to pay the cost which the eminent possession of 
such free ideals involves, for the idealism thus involved 
calls upon the individual to relinquish his hold upon 
the world, and develop talent in solitude, beauty and 
piety in seclusion. Of these ideals, so it seems, the world 
is not worthy. By its very nature, the inner life, prone 
as it is to decadence, needs to be renewed and refreshed 
by contact with the exterior order. Indeed, it is detach- 
ment from nature and humanity which has had the ef- 
fect of bringing about the crisis in individualism. In 
this spirit of faith in the world of things and persons, 
one turns from the subjectivity of Huysmans to the 
objectivity of Loti, from the aestheticism of Wilde to the 
naturism of Hardy. For the sake of the individual, 
even when he may have no real interest in things and 
men, it is advisable that individualism establish some 
sort of reunion with the world; and, as this has appeared 
possible in connection with the ideals of beauty and 
worth, so it should appear no less plausible a plea when 
philosophy advises the self to seek its truth in the world- 
whole of nature and humanity. 

The aim of knowledge is no longer to be expressed 
in militaristic manner as conquering things or being 
conquered by them; rather is it the more pacific ideal 
of learning how to live securely and worthily within 
the world of things. In this manner, the higher synthe- 



560 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

sis of the self in its unity and the world in its totality- 
expresses itself in the form of intellectual participation. 
The history of the human intellect does not reveal the 
mind trying to get out of reality; that is only the ration- 
alistic way of looking upon the matter. From what the 
work of human contemplation has been doing, it would 
appear as though man were trying to work himself into 
reality, in order that he may find his true place there. 
To participate in the world means more than to exer- 
cise the mere occupancy of existence in the world ; genu- 
ine participation means that man, instead of dwelling in 
the land like the aborigine, comes into possession of the 
world which he seems destined to inherit. This involves 
genuine knowledge of the world, and is far removed 
from merely experiencing impressions from without or 
thinking thoughts as these arise within. It is the knowl- 
edge by means of intellectual life. 

To advance the plain and obvious proposition involved 
in genuine knowledge, one has simply to say, "I know 
the world." Experience of impressions and thought con- 
cerning ideas are in no sense substitutes for this direct 
notion of knowledge. Modern realism has met modern 
idealism with a proposition which, while resembling the 
notion just expressed, fails to do justice to either thought 
or thing. In opposition to the claim that mind thinks 
ideas, realism asserts that mind knows things; the con- 
trast between the two may be represented thus : 

Mind : Idea : : World : Thing. 

That which realism endeavors to do is to remove the 
subjectivistic screen from the outside world and behold 
this world as such ; meanwhile, idealism contends, either 
that one can know only the subjectivistic screen, or that 
it can gain its only hint of the objective world by look- 
ing through this ideological device. Either we cannot 
know the world, or, if we know it, such knowledge 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 561 

can never be more than something indirect and infer- 
ential. Unfortunately for the mind, idealism is in no 
position to tell us anything more worthy of it than 
that it has the power to think ; unfortunately for the 
world, realism can do no more than assure us that it 
exists. Now those who are anxious to place the self 
in the world are equally anxious to entertain a sufficient 
idea of both the self and the world which are to be 
related, so that the problem of perception does not 
express all the issues of the proposition, " I know the 
world." 

Another view of the situation, and one which borrows 
from both idealism and realism, would present the mat- 
ter in such a manner as to let the idealistic mind know 
the realistic world. This would appear in the following 
manner : 

Intellectual Life : Self : : Thing : World-Whole. 

When, therefore, we assert that the mind knows the 
thing, we are asserting also that it is not merely mind 
as something reflective and representative, but as living 
which knows ; and when we add the assertion that the 
thing is known, we are not content with its immediate 
existence as object of perception, but see in it the sem- 
blance of the world in its totality. Idealism may still 
insist that the thinking mind shall place its screen 
before the object, just as realism may continue its con- 
tention that the idea of the world-whole is screened 
from and mediated to the mind by sense, but the view 
of intellectual life in the world can allow these half- 
significant suggestions only as their exponents admit that 
mind is more than mind, thing more than thing. 

The idealistic estimate of mind as the subject which 
knows is not sufficient to the demands of mind as that 
which lives. It is of the very genius of mind to be spon- 
taneous and creative, rather than calculating and repre- 



562 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

sentative. If knowledge were all logic, if mind did not 
have culture, such a partial conception of mind as 
thought-process might obtain; but mind has ever shown 
itself to be contemplative and creative; capable of art 
and religion as well as logic and metaphysics. The 
thought-process in mind, instead of being the sole form 
of intellectual activity, is but a special form of concen- 
tration in which all the phases of intellectual life are 
specialized in the form of judgment. This rationalistic 
method of treating mind is justifiable, not as the inher- 
ent principle of mind as intellectual life, but as a means 
of conceiving and communicating that which the mind 
has gathered from the world. To experience and enjoy 
are prerogatives of the intellectual life of the mind as 
such; to conceive of this content in a definite form and 
communicate it in proper fashion are privileges of the 
more rationalistic phases of thought. Thought is thus 
the vehicle of knowledge; knowledge itself is anterior 
to and independent of that which expresses it. 

The "world" in which the thought of man seeks to 
participate shows itself to consist of a world of forms, 
but not of that alone; already it has been pointed out 
that the world-whole is broad enough to be none the 
less a world of joys and a world of values. In order to 
gather the fruit of these, and not for the sake of empha- 
sizing the mere fact of order, the formal character of 
the world now comes in for expression. In all three 
forms of the world-whole, the aesthetical, the practical, 
and the intellectual, the individual seeks adequate objec- 
tivity. With its permanent interest in the subject, ideal- 
ism is ever ready to sacrifice the world in order that 
the self may enjoy independent, integral existence; for 
the sake of clearness and completeness in the objective 
order, realism is just as ready to eliminate the ego, which 
it can only regard as an interloper in the world of things. 
Yet all that idealism may really demand of existence is 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 563 

that the integrity of the soul be safeguarded from with- 
out ; all that realism has a right to expect is that the order 
of the objective world be preserved. But the complete 
unity of things, while it cannot obtain where the subject 
opposes the object, or the object the subject, may well 
be preserved when the self takes its place in the world 
as a principality within a kingdom, a play within a play. 
The self cannot be expected to think itself out of the 
world, nor has the self a right to expect that subjective 
cogitation will have the effect of removing the objective 
order in the case of either nature or humanity. 

In the case of individualism, in whose behalf all the 
foregoing study has been carried on, it may now be 
pointed out that, while scientism has no right to give to 
its exclusive interpretation of nature or sociality the 
authority to dictate to man concerning all humanity, the 
objective orders of nature and humanity as such are safe 
for the individual. The earlier individualism, dismayed 
at the crass objectivity of life, sought joy, worth, and 
truth within the narrow confines of its own nature. The 
result did more harm to the self than to the world, while 
it tended to point out that thought cannot perfect its ideal 
of complete subjectivity unless it involve a due degree of 
objectivity. But, if there be no worthy and adequate 
objectivity in the scientifico-social system, it does not 
follow that there is no hope of objectivity at all. There 
is in nature a greater extension and intension than is 
found in the scientific conception of nature, and thus it 
becomes the duty of philosophy to change the form of 
nature from a genitive to a secure nominative. In the 
same manner, humanity implies more content than has 
been found in the idea of society, so that again philosophy 
must seek to re-establish a higher synthesis according 
to which humanity in general shall take the place long 
occupied by the simple conception of society. When the 
aesthetical and ethical forms of philosophy applied them- 



564 TH E GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

selves to the higher synthesis, it appeared that both nature 
and humanity were capable of accommodating themselves 
to a higher view of joy and worth; in the same fashion, 
the consideration of life's truth should reveal the fact 
that nature and humanity are able to supply a superior 
conception of truth, which fails to appear in the scientific 
and social treatment of the world in which the individual 
lives. Then, with all three phases of individualism ex- 
panded an extra diameter, it may be assumed that both 
the self and the world are able to meet upon a higher 
plane on which the joy and worth and truth of life may 
be found without violating either the subjective or the 
objective. 

2. The Essence of Subjectivity 

The conception of knowledge as an interpretation of 
the world as a whole tends to prevent party-thinking 
from urging the special claims of its favorite principle, 
whether subject or object. If life were a library or a 
laboratory, where all objects to be known were duly 
classified and catalogued and where the life-interest 
was purely intellectualistic, then the neglect of sub- 
jectivity might be indulged without risk of spiritual 
disaster. But the given hurly-burly, in which unan- 
alyzed things and unorganized ideas are in constant 
confusion, warns the thinker that he must have an 
eye to the welfare of that life which is involved in 
this manifold. Exterior life, as this appears in indus- 
try, in social interest, and in material progress, has 
been organized to an extent and degree unknown in 
the life that is interior; the outer unity is far more 
perfect than the inner unity. As a result of this con- 
dition of external superiority, our human experience 
furnishes us with more than we can comprehend ; we 
do better than we know, live where we do not learn, 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 565 

and perfect the immediate at the expense of the remote. 
The pursuit of the practical has something plebian 
about it, while the devotion to immediacy rather than 
remoteness does not fail to suggest provincialism. 
That which keeps thought from the cultivation of those 
internal ends, which are acknowledged to express the 
most significant characteristics of humanity, is the dread 
of subjectivity. At this point, theory of knowledge 
suffers at the hands of both its enemies and its friends. 
The enemies of subjectivity exalt the exterior world 
of scientific research and social endeavor, and threaten 
with solipsism and egoism all who attempt to speak in 
favor of the inner life. The friends of subjectivity, 
from whom the devotee of the inner life must pray for 
deliverance, have prejudiced the plausibility of the sub- 
jective by treating it in a manner at once formal and 
polemical; formal in its lack of content, polemical in 
that the subjective has habitually been employed to dis- 
credit the existence of things. As a result, one might 
perhaps venture the assertion that as yet, in the history 
of thought, subjectivity has not been made the theme of 
philosophical study. 

In the midst of this pessimistic situation, the sub- 
jective has been allowed to pass over into the hands of 
those who, with their interest centered in art, ethics, 
and religion, have been able to defend the claims of 
subjectivity; but, in their ardor and with their special 
interests, they have ascribed to the inner life more value 
than validity. At this juncture, theory of knowledge 
appears and assumes more complete responsibility for 
that sense of interiority which in epistemological par- 
lance is known as subjectivity. The self demands knowl- 
edge as intellectual indemnity for the spiritual losses 
which it has suffered. Subjective notions, whether ideas 
or values, may not secure for the self its place in the 
world, but they may make the life of the self more 



566 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

secure within, as a man's house is his castle. From 
this point of view, subjectivity is not urged for the sake 
of showing that any other theory of knowledge is wrong, 
but with the aim of asserting that certain important 
life-interests are substantial in their character. The 
scientific opponents of subjectivity often fail to realize 
that, with their professional interests in particular, they 
may have general interests incident upon the fact that 
they are human beings as well as investigators of nature 
and history. When they oppose subjectivity, they con- 
tend against themselves ; and it is an ill bird that fouls 
its own nest. There are certain valid reasons for urging 
the claims of subjectivity, but it must not be assumed 
that these interests are subjectivistic as such. 

If we assume that complete objectivity with its attend- 
ant neutralization of consciousness is wrong, if we like- 
wise admit that the subjective thinker is at fault when 
he contends that all existence is so much consciousness, 
it becomes necessary to adjust the conscious and sub- 
jective within to the objective order. The most natural 
expedient at such a juncture is that quantitative one 
which assumes that a part of the field in question is 
subjective, a part objective. Those who avail them- 
selves of this simple device may even go so far as to 
stipulate that the subjective order is made up of values, 
while the content of the objective may be considered to 
be that of things. Apart from the manifest dualism 
which is hereby implied, there is another and more 
grievous difficulty which this principle of partition in- 
volves. That which the quantitative division of the field 
suggests is that the values within the subject have noth- 
ing thing-like or substantial about them, while the things 
which make up the objective order are wanting in worth. 
Now this arrangement, which may perhaps satisfy the 
artistic mind here and the scientific mind there, is far 
from being adequate for the philosophic mind, which is 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 567 

anxious to believe in the reality of human values and 
the worth of worldly things. Thus the division of the 
realms which puts the sea in one place and the land in 
another overlooks the fact that both sea and land make 
up one and the same globe. 

In more or less immediate relation with this principle 
of simple partition, one encounters the notion that sub- 
jective and objective, ideas and things, may be left to 
themselves in particular if they are related to some com- 
mon principle in general. Such an appeal to a tertiary 
principle appears most strikingly in Spinoza and Schel- 
ling. This exalted attempt to postulate the unity of that 
which exists within and without is likely to commend 
itself to all those who have liberal interests in philo- 
sophical speculation, just as it may be imagined to con- 
tain the essence of ultimate explanation; yet it is not a 
prize to be grasped at greedily. At the outset, when it 
has been declared that the finite mind cannot perceive 
things as they are, but can perceive them only as they 
have previously been related to the Infinite Mind, as 
Malebranche suggested, it becomes difficult to under- 
stand how the Infinite is any better off when it comes 
to perceiving things. Indeed, one might even contend 
that, on the contrary, it is the finite mind which is likely 
to perceive things, since by virtue of its nature as finite 
it is much nearer and more like those things than is the 
Infinite Mind. 

In the instance of the dualism which simply separates 
the realms of subjective and objective, and with the 
hasty monism which so rapidly relates them to a com- 
mon third-principle, there appears a difficulty which is 
more strident than the formal one to the effect that the 
tertiary principle, which by the way is never described 
in terms of human knowledge, is in no happier a posi- 
tion and is no more effectual as knower than is the finite 
mind. This difficulty expresses itself in the form of a 



568 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

complaint that the rash disjunction of thought and thing 
and the rapid reunion of the two makes it impossible 
for philosophy to indulge in a satisfactory examination 
of the content involved here in the idea, there in the 
thing. What is the nature of that subject which is so 
different from the object? Wherein consists the essence 
of that object which seems to defy subjective inter- 
ference? The quantitative adjustment of the two, for 
they are still distinct even after the attempted fusion of 
the monist, is guilty of overlooking the fact that both 
the subjective and the objective have a rich content 
which deserves adequate analysis. The psychological is 
not helped when the subjective is set off by itself; the 
interests of the physical are not advanced when the 
object is placed in isolation. This is a real rather than 
a formal difficulty; it seeks to identify essence and form 
without heeding the claims of content and character. 
Relief from such an unhappy situation is to be found 
only as thought appeals to a qualitative discrimination 
rather than a purely quantitative distinction between 
subject and object. 

That which first provokes and then furthers the qual- 
itative discrimination between subject and object is the 
general notion which is guiding the present student of 
the epistemological problem. This general notion is to 
the effect that knowledge is best understood as an intel- 
lectual life awakening within the world, not a thought- 
principle which is trying to make out the meaning of 
some alien realm. In this sense, knowledge is like a 
creature of earth trying to become acquainted with his 
habitat rather than like a scientific mind attempting to 
establish communication with another planet. Subject 
and object are in one and the same system; their differ- 
ence is one of kind rather than one of position. For 
the theory of knowledge, nothing can be more important 
than to enable man to discover the spirit that he is of. 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 569 

But this is what subjective thinking has always refrained 
from doing. Subjective thinking has taken the subject 
for granted and then, as though sighing for other worlds 
to conquer, has taken upon itself the task of explaining 
objectivity, which it has regarded as so much conscious- 
ness in general or so much perception in particular. 
Let it be granted that the objective order does stand in 
need of explanation, and let it further be admitted that 
the scientific method of description is often Hamlet 
minus the melancholy Dane ; it may still be pointed out, 
and that pessimistically, that subjectivity has still to 
account for the subject, which thus far has been little 
more than a name or a form. 

The subjective explanation of the subject, when this 
is taken up in a qualitative manner, begins by laying 
down a principle of intro-activity as that which, more 
than introspection, characterizes the inner life of the 
subject. The inherent difference between the intro- 
active and the introspective lies in the following facts 
of human experience. The human mind, instead of 
merely accepting its ideas, whether they be regarded 
as innate or derivative, has acted upon these in a manner 
characteristic of its own nature. The result is that sub- 
jectivity is made up of a system of human products 
whose existence and meaning are due to human culture. 
In the economic realm, the raw things of the world have 
been transmutated into values ; in aesthetics, the simple 
impressions of pleasure and pain have become principles 
of beauty or ugliness; in ethics, the spontaneous im- 
pulses have been changed into ideal courses of con- 
duct; in religion, the general sense of life in the world, 
whether optimistic or pessimistic, has been elevated to 
such notions as belief and blessedness. No matter how 
the mind may have originated, no matter what was its 
primitive condition, the fact remains that the human 
mind as such is now characterized by the results of 



570 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

humanistic culture; and it is this mind as human which 
is to be related to the objective order. If it be objected 
that the epistemological problem concerns mind as mind, 
it can only be said in rebuttal that mind as mind has 
shown itself to be an active, aggressive principle which, 
instead of taking what is given it by the world, makes 
up its content out of that given. In that constructed 
content the essence of true subjectivity is to be found, 
since theory of knowledge seeks to explain, not the mind 
of the animal, but the mind of man. Philosophy is not 
so naive as to make raw nature its object; it should 
not be so naive as to continue in its practice of making 
raw man the subject. On the outside, it is nature ex- 
plained scientifically which proposes the problem; with- 
in it should be man considered in the light of human 
culture. 

The emphasis which has been laid above upon the 
active and qualitative characteristics of subjectivity, 
tends to indicate that the subject is different rather than 
distinct from the object. At the same time, this manifest 
difference between the content of ideas and that of things 
may make the relation of subject to object appear, not 
less, but more plausible than is the case when subjectiv- 
ity is merely a rationalistic form. When it is appreci- 
ated that subjectivity is qualitatively different from ob- 
jectivity, the old competition between thought and thing 
tends to pass away. What ambition an idealistic system 
must have entertained to have imagined that thought 
could play the part of thing, and how equally ill-timed 
the materialistic hope that the thing might so perfect its 
nature as to become thought ! Until subjectivity has 
been established and thus consists of something more 
than purely psychological content of impressions and 
representations, it will be necessary for thought to do 
far more than it has done toward realizing the essential 
content of the subjective. This content as such is not 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 571 

wanting, since the careers of such things as art, moral- 
ity, and religion are indicative of what can be done with 
subjectivistic stuff; but the rationale of this implicit 
subjectivity is not yet at hand although it has long been 
needed. 

In the special instances of Aristotle and Hegel, it 
must be admitted that the culture of humanity has re- 
ceived due dialectical regard, and these encyclopedic 
systems have not been guilty of neglecting material 
offered them. But in the case of the ancient thinker, 
the manifold of culture was not placed in sufficiently 
close connection with the conceptualism of the thinker's 
theory of knowledge; with the modern philosopher, the 
connection was made unduly intimate, whence the facts 
of history and culture were unlawfully subsumed under 
the forms of an artificial dialectic. With Plato and 
Leibnitz, the desired relationship between things and 
ideas was not frustrated; but the acceptance of such 
systems necessarily involves the peculiar notions of 
Platonistic " participation " and the Leibnitzian prin- 
ciple of cosmic consciousness marked by infinite grada- 
tions. Furthermore, these superior thinkers have been 
so fearful of irrationalism that they have prejudiced 
their systems against every principle of spontaneity; 
Plato and Hegel could not tolerate it at all, Aristotle 
and Leibnitz would allow it only as it submitted to the 
domination of a conceptualizing reason. Still less happy 
was the fate of the individual among these thinkers ; 
alone among the four mentioned, Leibnitz employed a 
principle of individuation ; but, while his Monadology 
was punctuated by separate forms of being, the super- 
intendence of pre-established harmony was such as to 
preclude every individualistic initiative. Now the ab- 
sence of activity and individuality are felt more seri- 
ously in any philosophic which is interested in man as. 
such. 



572 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

3. The Character of Objectivity 

The opposition of the modern individual to the world, 
accompanied by various forms of decadence, pessimism, 
and nihilism, sprang from the unconscious feeling that 
the world, as interpreted by scientism and sociality, was 
both too small and too colorless to contain and content 
the human ego. In one sense, the truth of scientism 
could never be called into question, since such scientism 
advanced deliberately and not without justification for 
its system of ideas. But, in another sense, the whole 
scientific system, no matter how complete or convincing 
it might become, can be criticized as being insufficient, 
since it has ever been forced to ignore the content of 
the data which it fuses into general principles. In the 
same manner, the goodness of social thought, which 
accompanied the truth of scientism, was equally imper- 
vious to adverse criticism, since such social thought pro- 
ceeded soberly and justly from its fundamental prin- 
ciples. At the same time, individualism was not wholly 
at fault when it asserted that the social conception of 
life, however complete and consistent it might appear 
to be, was guilty of avoiding the character of the indi- 
vidual which it- sought to weave into its system. Scien- 
tifico-social thinking has been able to build a wall whose 
symmetry and stability cannot be questioned, but the 
fate of the individual stone among the other stones in 
the wall is far from being a happy one. On the aes- 
thetic side, individualism has protested that the things 
of the world are not to be absorbed by analytical science, 
which cannot appreciate the significance of them; on 
the ethical side, this same individualism has objected 
to the social tendency to assemble and analyze human 
beings without taking into account the character of 
humanity as such. Science is no longer natural; social- 
ity is not human. The truth and worth of science and 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 573 

sociality are not equivalent to the truth and worth of 
life as lived by man in the world. 

The lack of truthfulness which appears in the midst 
of scientific truth appears at once in the attempt on the 
part of analytical thought to reduce man to the level of 
things, in order that the scientific arrangement of the 
world may be smooth and complete. In the spirit of a 
cynical optimism, scientism has insisted upon a kind of 
self-abnegation which is bound to appear ridiculous in 
a scientific age where all theoretical and practical activi- 
ties are consecrated to the selfish desire to obtain the 
greatest possible benefit from the world. Science is 
thus modern in its theoretical ideals, but more than 
mediaeval in its ethics; in the midst of its academic 
interests, it calls upon man to practice remorseless self- 
abnegation. In its superstition, scientism calls upon 
man to sacrifice his soul in behalf of an idea, as 
Abraham felt constrained to sacrifice his son for the 
sake of an abstract principle. The individual is thus 
placed in a position where he is called upon to choose 
between the sense of selfhood as something intrinsic 
and valuable within him and the ideal of science as 
a complete and optimistic arrangement of things in the 
exterior world. To accept inorganic science, one must 
take the Copernican astronomy at the risk of losing his 
place in the world; and to embrace organic existence, 
as this shapes itself in Darwinism, he must surrender 
the notion that his life is characteristic and worthy. 
The truth without is the sworn foe of the truth within. 
It is commonly supposed that religion and religion 
alone has appeared as the opponent of the scientific view 
of the world, but the review of individualism, which this 
work has been taking up, should serve to show that art 
and morality have been no less inimical to the scientific 
generalization. Individualism has assumed that the joy, 
worth, and truth of life are true, and has not hesitated 



574 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



to oppose the truth of these to the truthfulness of the 
scientific. In few cases, like those of Stirner and 
Nietzsche, has the opposition to the intellectual ideals 
of the day been direct and definite; yet it must not be 
overlooked that the scientifico-social synthesis has had 
the effect of driving the individualist to a position of 
irrationalism, which amounts to the practical repudi- 
ation of all those truths which the scientific mind has 
seen fit to express. The situation engendered by this 
opposition between scientism and irrationalism is a diffi- 
cult one to meet, since science with its secular truths 
has not been questioned as has been religion with its 
sacred ones: then, the spirit of doubt is of such a nature 
that it allows itself to attack only those things that are 
precious in human life, which amounts to saying that 
there can always be religious doubt but never scientific 
skepticism. In the midst of this predicament, let it be 
borne in mind that art, morality, and religion have long 
been in opposition to scientism, even when they have 
not made use of logical methods to refute what they 
have felt free to repudiate. How is this opposition to 
be overcome without surrendering the values of the 
inner life or the accepted principles of scientific reason- 
ing? 

In the endeavor on the part of individualism to adjust 
itself to scientism, it may be pointed out that such sci- 
entism has been guilty of doing both too much and too 
little. Scientism has done too much in passing onward 
from its principle of science physical to science social, 
a movement in connection with which it has allowed 
its optimistic ideal of smooth continuity to urge it on 
and present trim philosophical notions. This exagger- 
ated activity of the scientific mind appeared in the 
Enlightenment when, after it was shown that nature is 
mechanical and rational, it was concluded that life is 
likewise rational and formal. The unhappy effect of 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 575 

such an extension of logic appeared in special con- 
nection with natural rights and natural religion, whose 
invalidity has long since been recognized. After the 
passing of the Enlightenment, the age of Positivism 
urged that, since the things of the world may be 
understood in a manner purely naturalistic, so may 
also the sons of men be measured. It was in the 
spirit of counter-Positivism that individualism arose. 
In assuming the role of artist, moralist, and religionist, 
the scientific thinker was found in a contradictory posi- 
tion. On the other hand, it may be pointed out that 
scientism, which did too much in one field, was guilty 
of omitting something significant in another. Scientism 
has failed to supply the mind with a view of the world 
as a whole; that is, scientism has failed to account for 
nature as nature is understood and appreciated in the 
general experience of mankind. If scientism had over- 
come its ambition to dictate values to mankind, and had 
used its surplus energy in producing a more complete 
view of the natural order, many misunderstandings 
might have been avoided. What scientism has done 
has been to draw its smooth lines of latitude and longi- 
tude over the rough and ready globe; but, instead of 
evincing the idea of nature, scientism has developed a 
mere frame-work of theoretical completeness. As a 
result of this scientific hypostasis, the individualist was 
driven out of nature to find his values in an anti-natural 
manner, as David was driven out of his inheritance by 
Saul, who said, " Go serve other gods." 

Nature has been overlooked in the midst of the con- 
flict between scientism and individualism, and it is upon 
the basis of nature, conceived in its totality, that the 
higher synthesis of self and the world is to be made. 
This is in no sense a new thought, nor does it imply the 
assumption that science must be superseded by a higher 
form of intellectual life, even when one may be enough 



576 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

of a futurist to believe that just such a new form of 
intellectual life is destined to appear. All that such a 
naturalism implies is that the ideal of nature, as this 
has long obtained in human thought, shall be allowed 
to enter into a view of the world that has recently been 
subsumed under the special forms of scientific reason- 
ing. Such an idea of nature is not vague, since it has 
constantly been involved in the considerations of the 
aesthetic consciousness ; nor has it been long lost to 
view, since it appears clearly in Goethe and Emerson, 
just as glimpses of it are seen in more recent prophets. 
The misunderstanding which has arisen has been due to 
the fact that we in our scientific enthusiasm have been 
guilty of assuming that science is equivalent to nature, 
just as the Greeks were wont to imagine that nature was 
found in art and art alone. The concept nature is deep- 
and rich enough to include both man and nature, as 
well as other forms of human culture which may be 
derived from it. In the idea of nature, which is more 
disinterested than indefinite, the higher synthesis of self 
and world should be found. 

In a corresponding fashion, relief from the contra- 
diction between selfhood and society may be found in 
a higher synthesis which subsumes both these notions 
under the form of humanity. The lack of worth in the 
concept society appears, for the good which society seeks 
to bestow is at once " for all and none." In order that 
the social program may be made smooth and complete, 
it becomes necessary to emasculate humanity; the social 
thinker then has his labor for his pains. Just as sci- 
entism calls upon the intellect to indulge in complete 
self-abnegation, so sociality can proceed only as the 
individual indulges in a kind of self-renunciation. Like 
scientism, sociality is advanced in its theory but reac- 
tionary and mediaeval in its ethics, since sociality calls 
upon the individual to forfeit all that is characteristic 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 577 

of him and dear to him, for the sake of a generalization. 
When sociality attempts to construct human life, its 
positive work is as distressing as the destructive activity 
of a scientism which is death to all ideals. Social art, 
social morality, and social religion appear worse than 
that absence of all that is aesthetic, moral, and religious 
in scientism. The friendship of sociality is thus worse 
than the enmity of scientism; and to the former one 
must attribute all that decadence, immoralism, and irre- 
ligion which modern individualism has felt called upon 
to develop. Were one forced to choose between the 
life-ideals of sociality and the distressing standards of 
decadent individualism, he would have no right to choose 
in favor of the drab principles of social life, since the 
lurid and frightful norms of decadence would still have 
the advantage of conserving the true spirit of art, ethics, 
and belief. 

Like scientism, sociality has attempted too great a 
task here, too small a problem there ; sociality has sought 
to elaborate the content of life when it is privileged to 
indicate its form only. Sociality has been guilty of 
making an ideal of the obvious, when ideals are ever 
made of those interests which the natural tendencies of 
man are in danger of neglecting. Just as mankind is 
forced to relate itself to the world of things, so men 
are expected to adjust themselves to one another; and 
just as scientism has sought to idealize this obvious 
principle, so sociality has sought to lay down a prin- 
ciple on the basis of the plain fact that, with industrial 
and social interdependence, men are more and more 
called upon to have larger and larger social interests. 
But, with this obvious arrangement of life's practical 
affairs, it is not possible to go on and contend that the 
aesthetical, ethical, and religious content of life is to be 
reduced to the social level, for there may be level roads 
without the leveling of the whole country. Sociality is 



578 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 

to be judged by its failure to evince the idea of human- 
ity as a whole ; indeed, it has been the fate and good 
fortune of individualistic periods to produce this genial 
ideal. Ordinarily, one criticizes social thinking for the 
way in which it has treated the idea of individuality, 
but social thinking has been just as faulty as its treat- 
ment of mankind at large, whence the idea of social 
humanity, natural in itself, is not far from being a con- 
tradiction in terms. Social thinking has spent its time 
plaguing the individual rather than in perfecting the 
idea of humanity. 

As has been pointed out from time to time in the 
foregoing work, humanity is an idea which is at once 
quantitative and qualitative, extensive and intensive. 
From both points of view, social thinking has failed to 
produce anything like a genuine humanism. In sug- 
gesting that scientism has failed to yield the idea of 
nature and that sociality has been equally unsatisfactory 
in its attempt to elaborate the idea of humanity, we pass 
criticism which may seem incredible, inasmuch as these 
forms of human culture have aimed at nothing else than 
the ideas in question. Yet, as one must often claim that 
theology fails to express the nature of religion and as 
law often produces a caricature of justice, so we may 
continue to insist that nature has escaped scientism 
while humanity has eluded sociality. The result has 
been to produce a spurious sense of objectivity, so that 
the man of the present hour has no world that may be 
called a world; the scientifico-social frame-work which 
so often passes for a world-order is far from being the 
place in which the individual lives and moves and has 
his being. 

The failure to provide objectivity for the individual 
is corroborated by the thought that, in the proffered 
world of scientism and sociality, there is no sense of 
either human destiny or human dignity. In a certain 



TRUTH OF LIFE IN THE WORLD-WHOLE 579 

sense, the whole meaning of the individualistic revolt 
may be summed up by calling this nihilistic movement 
a demand for human destiny in nature and human dig- 
nity in the social order. Just what these ideas connote 
need not be repeated, since their meaning has been con- 
stantly implied in connection with The Struggle for 
Selfhood and The Repudiation of Sociality; neverthe- 
less, it may not be out of place to indicate that the 
restoration of human destiny and dignity should come 
about by means of an adequate life-objectivity, as this 
appears in nature and humanity as such. In the midst 
of its struggle for independent existence, individualism 
has been at fault in contenting itself with the inner 
unity of life, which cannot long endure apart from an 
objective unity in nature and humanity. The substi- 
tution of nature and humanity for the minor ideals of 
science and society should have the effect of cleansing 
individualism of its decadence and nihilism; at the same 
time, the change from minor to major conceptions can 
do no harm to a sincere view of the world or a worthy 
estimate of human life. There is a ground of human 
life and a goal also ; if these fail to appear in the scien- 
tific treatment of things and in the social philosophy of 
persons, the ground may be found in a just view of 
nature, the goal in a dignified conception of humanity. 



37 



INDEX 



Actual Naturalization of Life, 
The, 33 ; see Naturalization 
of Life, The Actual. 

/Eschylus, 462, 473. 

Aesthetic and Analytic, The, 
108. 

Aesthetic Form of Decadence, 
The, 293. 

Aesthetic Nature of Enjoy- 
ment, The, 400. 

Aesthetic Synthesis, The, 416: 
1. The Aesthetic Synthesis 
with Nature, 417; 2. The 
Aesthetic Synthesis with 
Humanity, 426. 

Aestheticism, The Rights of, 
107: (1) The Aesthetic and 
Analytic, 108; (2) Aestheti- 
cism as Individualism, 116. 

Affirmation of the Self, The, 
175. 

Ambiguous Elevation of the 
Physical, The, 40; see Physi- 
cal, The Ambiguous Eleva- 
tion of the. 

Analytic — The Aesthetic and, 
108. 

Anaxagoras, 60, 62, 554. 

Anselm, 36, 334, 335. 

Anti-Scientific and Anti-social, 
The, 9. 

Anti-social Character of De- 
cadence, The, 297. 

Anti-social — The Anti-scien- 
tific and, 9. 

Apollo, Apollonian, 34, 169, 
327. 

Apuleius, Lucius, 294. 



Aquinas, Thomas, 55, 56, 165, 
166, 170, 321, 428, 527. 

Aristotle, 36, 43, 48, 55, 73, 90, 
91, 92, 137, 166, 167, 171, 253, 
274, 284, 339, 395, 449, 452, 
468, 527, 57 1- 

Augustine, St., 36, 59, 412, 460. 

Bacon, Francis, 39, 43, 349, 
538. 

Balzac, Honore de, 155, 156, 
45i, 473- 

Barres, Maurice, 516. 

Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, 62, 
70, no, in, 112, 113, 115, 
118, 127, 145, 153, 161, 181, 
182, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 
201, 212, 220, 221, 226, 242, 
283, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 
298, 304, 328, 329, 343, 399, 
404, 418, 419, 425, 426, 450, 
516, 517, 521, 527. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 28, 249, 397, 

398. 
Berkeley, George, 26, 27, 512, 

548. 

Beyle, Marie Henri, see 

"Stendhal, De." 

Biological, The Elevation of 
the, 52: (1) Positivism and 
Humanism, 53; (2) Biology 
and Psychology, 57. 

Blake, William, 73, 74, I09 : 
135, 137, 151, 152, 157, 170, 
173, 182, 186, 187, 190, 191, 
220, 223, 224, 242, 397, 398, 
5i6. 

Bodin, Jean, 43, 44, 210. 



582 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Bourget, Paul, 115, 155, 297, 
298, 319, 321, 343. 346. 

Boutroux, 78, 80. 

Bruno, Giordano, 45. 

Buddha, Buddhism, 177, 180, 
305, 330, 357, 444- 

Burke, Edmund, 396, 397. 

Butler, Joseph, 151, 219, 238, 
269, 386, 387. 

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 

134- 

Cartesian, see Descartes. 

Character of Objectivity, The, 
572. 

Character of World-Work, 
The, 458: 1. The Freedom 
of Work, 459; 2. The Value 
of Work, 470. 

Characteristic Element In 
Work, The, 452. 

Chateaubriand, Francois Rene 
Auguste, Vicomte de, 197. 

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 294. 

Claims of Irreligion, The, 186. 

Clarke, Samuel, 247. 

Comte, Auguste, 44, 55, 56, 66, 
69, 77, 79, 80, 134, 144, 147, 
165, 197, 199, 201, 213, 235, 
237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 257, 

334, 345. 419, 424. 527- 

Consciousness of Happiness, 
The, 287. 

Copernicus, 43, 573. 

Corneille, Pierre, 23, 24. 

Creative — Work as, 439. 

Criteria of Truth — Human- 
istic, 170. 

Cud worth, Ralph, 247, 249. 

Cumberland, Richard, 131, 213, 
236, 269. 

Dante, Alighieri, 403. 

Darwin, Charles, 53, 66, 71, 72, 



80, 94, 120, 147, 148, 151, 157, 
158, 159, 243, 244, 245, 257, 
300, 386, 387, 419, 486, 531, 

573- 

Decadent, The Individual as. 
292: (1) The Aesthetic 
Form of Decadence, 293 ; 
(2) The Anti-social Char- 
acter of Decadence, 297. 

Decadence, Decadent, 9, n, 13, 
60, 62, 118, 120, 145, 170, 222, 
282, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 
297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 318, 
324, 325, 404, 405, 410, 422, 

425, 427- 
Demands of Immoralism, The, 

145- 

Descartes, Rene, Cartesians, 
Cartesianism, 22, 23, 24, 25, 
26, 27, 49, 50, 59, 99, 102, 103, 
140, 153, 164, 209, 238, 334, 
335, 368, 412, 416, 512, 514, 
515, 516, 521. 

Desire — Value and, 305. 

Desjardins, 63, 197. 

Dewey, John, 312. 

Dilettantism — Skepticism as, 

343- 
Dionysius, Dionysian, 34, 65.. 

83, 169, 170, 327- 
Disappointment of Scientism, 

The Intellectual, 75. 
Dostoievsky, Fyodor, 64, 73, 

86, 131, 132, 150, 154, 155, 

158, 159, 160, 161, 391, 492, 

501, 516. 
Ego, The Empirical, 25. 
Egoism and Individualism, 368. 
Elevation of the Biological, 

The, 52 ; see Biological, The 

Elevation of. 
Elevation of the Physical, The 



INDEX 



583 



Ambiguous, 40; see Physical, 
The Ambiguous Elevation 
of. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 86, 
127, 131, 135, 140, 150, 156, 
157, 161, 170, 186, 192, 193, 
194, 195, 196, 261, 424, 439, 
478, 485, 512, 516, 529, 576. 

Empirical Ego, The, 25. 

Enlightenment, The, 6, 7, 9, 17, 
20, 22, 23, 28, 32, 47, 51,' 52, 
83, 85, 93, 103, 104, 116, 140, 
141, 144, 146, 164, 166, 167, 
168, 199, 208, 209, 212, 213, 

214, 215, 225, 235, 237, 263, 

264, 273, 363, 368, 375, 399, 
417, 490, 495, 496, 519, 558, 
574, 575- 

Enjoyment of Existence, The 
391 : 1. Joy and Pleasure, 
392 ; 2. The Aesthetic Na- 
ture of Enjoyment, 400; 3. 
Enjoyment as Vision, 410. 

Enjoyment of Life, The In- 
ward, 88. 

Epicurus, 393, 394, 449. 

Essence of Subjectivity, The, 

564- 

Eucken, Rudolf, 371, 455. 

Eudasmonistic Element in 
Work, The, 448. 

Existence, The Enjoyment of, 
391 : 1. Joy and Pleasure^ 
392; 2. The Aesthetic Nat- 
ure of Enjoyment, 400; 3. 
Enjoyment as Vision, 410. 

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 98, 99, 
137, 352, 434, 439, 460, 492, 
514, 521. 

Flaubert, Gustave, 285, 319, 
320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 327, 
343, 395- 



Fouillee, A., 60. 

France, Anatole, 133, 347. 

Freedom of Work, The, 459. 

Galileo, 45. 

Gautama, see Buddha. 

Gautier, Theophile, 113, 294, 

295- 
Gentilis, 210. 
Geulincx, Arnold, 24, 135, 136, 

137, 139, 326, 329, 470. 
Goal of Life in Society, The, 

205 ; see Society, The Goal 

of Life in. 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 

80, 197, 199, 261, 279, 285, 

313, 328, 381, 395, 403, 424, 

452, 472, 473, 474, 475, 492, 

500, 512, 576. 
Gorgias, 62. 
Gorky, Maxim, 354, 355, 474, 

475- 

Gray, Asa, 158. 

Grotius, Hugo, 181, 210, 21T, 
212, 236, 489. 

Ground of Life in Nature, 
The, 17; see Nature, The 
Ground of Life in. 

Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 66, 
77, 79, 80, 147, 423. 

Happiness — Humanity a n d, 
275: (1) Happiness as 
Willed, 277; (2) The Con- 
sciousness of Happiness, 287. 

Hardy, Thomas, 188, 559. 

Harvey, William, 49. 

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 96, 97, 
268, 282, 426. 

Hedonic Synthesis, The, 480: 
(1) Naturalism and Nihil- 
ism, 481 ; (2) Sociality and 
Humanity, 486. 

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fried- 



5§4 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



rich, 175, 193, 194, 257, 353, 

517, 57i. 
Hello, Ernest, 23, 60, 73. 
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig 

Ferdinand von, 60. 
Heraclitus, 465, 466, 467, 480, 

550, 551, 552, 554. 
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 58. 
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 

257. 

Hewlett, Maurice, 153. 

Higher Synthesis, The, 12, 363 : 
Part One, The Joy of Life 
in the World- Whole, 366; 
Part Two, The Worth of 
Life in the World- Whole, 
437; Part Three, The Truth 
of Life in the World-Whole, 

509- 
Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 32, 46, 48, 

49, 50, 71, 85, 93, 99, 105, 

209, 210, 211, 212, 2l6, 219, 

234, 236, 237, 238, 247, 248, 

269, 352, 369, 4l6, 481, 489, 
522. 

Hoffman, 109. 

Homer, 40, 462. 

Hood, Thomas, no. 

Hugo, Victor, 268. 

Human — The Understanding 

as, 537. 
Humanism — Positivism and 

53- 

Humanistic Criteria of Truth, 
170. 

Humanistic Nature of Value, 
304; see Value, The Human- 
istic Nature of. 

Humanistic, The Naturalistic 
and, 41. 

Humanity and Happiness, 275 : 
(1) Happiness as Willed, 



277; (2) The Conscious- 
ness of Happiness, 287. 

Humanity and Truth, 338. 

Humanity a World of Values, 
501. 

Humanity — Sociality and, 486. 

Humanity, The Aesthetic Syn- 
thesis with, 426. 

Hume, David, 26, 53, 166, 213, 
236, 511, 550. 

Huneker, James, 319. 

Huxley, Thomas, 243. 

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 106, 
115, 182, 297, 374, 418, 426, 
450, 559- 

Ibsen, Henrik, 21, 24, 38, 39, 64, 
86, 95, 96, 126, 140, 161, 175, 
186, 188, 244, 317, 344, 353, 
372, 397, 399, 419, 428, 462, 
485, 512. 

Immoralism, The Demands of, 
145- 

Impotence of Scientism, The 
Volitional, 70. 

Inadequacy of Scientism, The 
Sensational, 63. 

Inadequacy of the Social, The, 
252; see Social, The Inade- 
quacy of the. 

Independence of Soul-states. 
The, 97. 

Individual as Decadent, The, 
292: (1) The Aesthetic Form 
of Decadence, 293 ; (2) The 
Anti-social Character of De- 
cadence, 297. 

Individual as Pessimist, The, 
318; see Pessimist — The In- 
dividual as. 

Individual as Skeptic, Ths, 
342; see Skeptic, The In- 
dividual as. 



INDEX 



585 



Individualism — Aestheticism 
as, 116. 

Individualism and Nominal- 
ism, 528. 

Individualism — Egoism land, 
368. 

Individualistic Initiative, The, 

133- 
Initiative, The Individualistic, 

133. 
Insufficiency of Scientism. 
The, 62 ; see Scientism, The 
Insufficiency of. 
Intelligible — Work as, 444. 
Intellectual Disappointment of 

Scientism, The, 75. 
Intellectual Life, Knowledge 
as, 536: 1. The Under- 
standing as Human, 537; 2. 
The Origin and Ground of 
Knowledge, 542; 3. The 
object of Knowledge, 551. 
Intellectual Synthesis, The, 
555 : 1. Knowledge as In- 
terpretation, 556; 2. The Es- 
sence of Subjectivity, 564; 
3. The Character of Object- 
ivity, 572. 
Interpretation — Knowledge as. 

556. 
Introduction, 3 : The Pro- 
blem, 4: Selfhood, Scien- 
tism, and Sociality, 5 ; The 
Anti-scientific and Anti-soc- 
ial, 9; The Higher Synthe- 
sis, 12. 
Inward Enjoyment of Life, 

The, 88. 
Irreligion, The Claims of, 186. 
James, William, 21. 
Joy and Pleasure, 392. 
Jcys, Life the Place of, 274: 



1. Humanity and Happiness, 
275 ; 2. The Individual as 
Decadent, 292. 

Joy of Life in the World- 
Whole, The, 366; I. One's 
Own Life, 367; II. The En- 
joyment of Existence, 391 ; 
III. The Aesthetic Synthe- 
sis, 416. 

Joy of Life, The Struggle for 
the, 87: 1. The Inward En- 
joyment of Life, 88; 2. The 
Independence of Soul-states, 
97; 3. The Rights of Aesthe- 
ticism, 107. 
Kahn, Gustav, 99. 

Knower, The Self as, 512. 
Knowledge as Intellectual 
Life, 536: 1. The Under- 
standing as Human, 537; 2. 
The Origin and Ground of 
Knowledge, 542; 3. The Ob- 
ject of Knowledge, 551. 
Knowledge as Interpretation, 
556. 

Kant, Immanuel, 22, 29, 30, 31. 
32, 33, 73, 81, 105, 109, no, 
137, 140, 146, 148, 173, 199, 
245, 270, 278, 293, 310, 378, 
402, 413, 415, 439, 469, 470, 
500, 512, 514, 516, 519, 521, 
538, 539, 540, 542, 543, 546, 
547, 548, 550, 557, 558. 

Lack of Life-character in Soc- 
iality, 263. 

Lack of Life-content in Soc- 
iality, 253. 

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 
von, 54, 571. 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 31, 
551. 

Life, The Actual Naturaliza- 



586 THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



tion of, 33 ; see Naturaliza- 
tion of Life, The Actual. 

Life-character in Sociality, 
Lack of, 263. 

Life-content in Sociality, Lack 
of, 253. 

Life, The Inward Enjoyment 
of, 88. 

Life in Nature, The Ground 
of, 17 : see Nature, The 
Ground of Life in. 

Life, The Naturalization of, 
19: see Naturalization of 
Life, The. 

Life the Place of Joys, 274; 
see Joys, Life the Place of. 

Life the Place of Truths, 330; 
see Truths, Life the Place 
of. 

Life the Place of Values, 304; 
see Values, Life the Place 
of. 

Life, the Practical Socializa- 
tion of, 225 ; see Socializa- 
tion of Life, The Practical. 

Life, One's Own, 367: 1. 
Egoism and Individualism, 
368 ; 2. Naturistic Possibili- 
ties of Selfhood, 374; 3. 
Social Possibilities of Self- 
hood, 383. 

Life in Society, The Goal of. 
205 ; see Society, The Goal 
of Life in. 

Life, the Socialization of, 207 ; 
see Socialization of Life, 
The. 

Life, The Struggle for the Joy 
of, 87; see Joy of Life, The 
Struggle for the. 

Life, The Struggle for the 
Truth of, 163: see Truth of 
Life, The Struggle for the. 



Life, The Struggle tfor the 
Worth of, 121 ; see Worth 
of Life, The Struggle for 
the. 

Life — Truth and, 331: (1) So- 
ciality and Truth, 332; (2) 
Humanity and Truth, 338. 

Life in the World-Whole, 
The Joy of, 366; see Joy of 
Life in the World- Whole, 
The. 

Life in the World-Whole, 
The Truth of, 509; see 
Truth of Life in the World- 
Whole, The. 

Life in the World-Whole : 
The Worth of, 437; see 
Worth of Life in the 
World- Whole, The. 

Locke, John, 25, 26, 50, 181, 
5ii, 538, 539- 540, 542. 

Lombroso, Cesare, 114. 

Loti, Pierre, 559. 

Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 312. 

Machiavelli, Nicolo, 210. 

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 426. 

Malebranche, Nicolas, 548, 
567. 

Mallarme, 198, 201. 

Man as Valuer, 496. 

Mandeville, Bernard, 219, 223. 

Martineau, James, 270. 

Marx, Karl, 251, 310, 313. 

Mill, John Stuart, 212, 213, 
235, 237, 238, 249, 250, 251, 
264, 397, 419. 

Milton, John, 73, 74, 109, 135, 
137, 151, 152, 157, 170, 182, 
220, 221, 222, 223. 

Mind and World, The Trans- 
mutation of, 19 ; see Trans- 
mutation of Mind and 
World, The. 



INDEX 



587 



Montaigne, Michel de, 53. 

Morality, The Socialization 
of, 234: (1) The Social 
Source of Morality, 235 ; 
(2) The Social Sanction of 
Morality, 243. 

More, Sir Thomas, 210. 

Morice, Charles, 23, 99, 197.. 
198, 200, 201, 347. 

Naturalism and Nihilism, 481. 

Naturalism, The Surrender 
to 34. 

Naturalistic and Humanistic, 
The, 41. 

Naturistic Possibilities of 
Selfhood, 374. 

Naturalization of Life, The, 
19; I. The Transmutation 
of Mind and World, 19; II. 
The Actual Naturalization 
of Life, 33; III. The In- 
sufficiency of Scientism, 62. 

Naturalization of Life, The 
Actual, 33 : 1. The Surren- 
der to Naturalism, 34; 2. 
The Ambiguous Elevation of 
the Physical, 40; 3. The 
Elevation of the Biological, 
52. 

Nature, The Aesthetic Syn- 
thesis with, 417. 

Nature, The Ground of Life 
in, 17: Part One, The Nat- 
uralization of Life, 19; Part 
Two, The Struggle for Self- 
hood, 84. 

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 34, 
60, 62, 70, 71, 73, 126, 127, 
131, US, 137, 141, 145, 150. 
151, 154, 155, 161, 169, 173 
186, 212, 220, 221, 222, 223, 
224, 226, 243, 247, 249, 250, 



251, 266, 267, 281, 283, 298. 
299, 300, 304, 322, 326, 327, 
369, 372, 398, 399, 5 1 9, S24. 
574- 

Nihilism — Naturalism and, 
481. 

Nihilism — Pessimism as, 318. 

Nominalism — Individualism 
and, 528. 

Nordau, Max, 65, 114, 115, 
116, 299, 372. 

Object of Knowledge, The, 
55i. 

Objective and Subjective. 
The, 47. 

Objectivity, The Character of. 
572. 

One's Own Life, 367: 1. Ego- 
ism and Individualism, 368; 
2. Naturistic Possibilities of 
Selfhood, 374; Social Possi- 
bilities of Selfhood, 383. 

One's Own Self, 510; 1. The 
Self as Knower, 512; 2. 
Selfhood and (Solipsism, 
520; 3. Individualism and 
Nominalism, 528. 

One's Own Work, 438: r. 
The Truth of Work in Na- 
ture, 439; 2. The Worth of 
Work, 447. 

Origin and Ground of Knowl- 
edge, The, 542. 

Parmenides, 412, 465, 466, 467, 
543, 550, 552, 553- 

Pascal, Blaise, 23, 24. 

Passion for Predication, The, 
165. 

Paulhan, 63, 197. 

Pessimist — The Individual as, 
318: (1) Pessimism as Ni- 



583 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



hilism, 318; The Pessimism 
of Will, 324- 

Petronius, 294. 

Phidias, 342, 430. 

Physical, The Ambiguous 
Elevation of, 40: (1) The 
Naturalistic and Humanis- 
tic, 41 ; (2) The Objective 
and Subjective, 47. 

Place of Joys — Life the, 274; 
see Joys, Life the Place of. 

Place of Truths— Life the, 
330; see Truths, Life the 
Place of. 

Place of Values — Life the, 
304; see Values, Life the 
Place of. 

Plato, Platonism, 36, 47, 105, 
167, 170, 304, 311, 315, 321, 
336, 338, 339, 349, 351, 38 r, 
403, 428, 430, 454, 466, 469, 
514, 523, 543, 546, 548, 550, 
55i, 552, 553, 554, 57i- 

Pleasure — Joy and, 392. 

Plotinus, 557. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 109, no 
117, 118, 189, 190, 404, 406, 
424, 426, 516. 

Pope, Alexander, 28, 397. 

Positivism, 17. 

Positivism and Humanism, 
53- 

Possibilities of Selfhood, 
Naturistic, 374. 

Possibilities of Selfhood, So- 
cial, 383. 

Practical Socialization of Life, 
The, 225 ; see Socialization 
of Life, The Practical. 

Practical Synthesis, The, 480: 
1. The Hedonic Synthesis, 



480; 2. Value as Synthetic 
Principle, 494. 

Praxiteles, 342. 

Predication, The Passion for, 
165. 

Prevost, L'Abbe, 154. 

Problem, The, 4 : Selfhood, 
Scientism, and Sociality, 5; 
The Anti-scientific and Anti- 
social, 9; The Higher Syn- 
thesis, 12. 

Protagoras, 47, 105, 128, 168, 

175, 334, 55 1- 

Psychology — Biology and, 57. 

Puffendorf, Samuel von, 211, 
489. 

Reid, Thomas, 23. 

Renaissance, The, 40, 45. 

Renan, Joseph Ernest, 346, 
347- 

Repudiation of Sociality, The, 
273 ; see Sociality, The Re- 
pudiation of. 

Rette, 99. 

Ricardo, David, 251. 

Rights of Aesfheticism, The, 
107; see Aestheticism, The 
Rights of. 

Ritschl, Albrecht, 81, 173. 

Rod, Edmund, 6s, 197. 

Rodenbach, 99. 

Romanticism, Romanticist, Ro- 
mantic Revolt, 9, 11, 13, 33. 
62, 65, 93, 94, 116, 149, 256, 
279, 282, 293. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 25, 

85, 93- 
Samain, 99. 
Sanction of Morality, The 

Social, 243. 
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 

Joseph, 377, 424, 557, 567. 



INDEX 



589 



Schiller, Johann Christoph 
Friedrich von, 162, 279, 293, 
310, 312, 402, 500, 527. 

Schiller, Ferdinand C. S., 312. 

Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Fried- 
rich von, 21, 62, 93, 94, 127, 
149, 152, 153, 156, 279, 399, 
418, 450, 516. 

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst 
Daniel, 58, 59, 81, 149, 181, 
188, 189, 190, 192, 196, 516. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 54, 
58, 59, 94, 135, 136. 137, 138, 
139, 179, 326, 329, 358, 4&>, 
470, 478. 

Scientism — Selfhood, Scien- 
tists, and Sociality, 5. 

Scientism, The Insufficiency 
of, 62 : 1. The Sensational 
Inadequacy of Scientism, 
63 ; 2. The Volitional Im- 
potence of Scientism, 70; 
3. The Intellectual Disap- 
pointment of Scientism, 75. 

Self, The Affirmation of the, 

I7S- 

Self, One's Own, 510: 1. The 
Self as Knower, 512; 2. 
Selfhood and Solipsism, 
520; 3. Individualism and 
Nominalism, 528. 

Self and Society, The Trans- 
valuation of, 208; see Trans- 
valuation of Self and So- 
ciety, The. 

Self as Thinker, The, 21. 

Selfhood, Naturistic Possibili- 
ties of, 374. 

Selfhood, Scientism, and So- 
ciality, 5. 

Selfhood in Selfishness, 209. 



Selfhood, Social Possibilities 
of, 383. 

Selfhood and Solipsism, 520. 

Selfhood in Strength, 220. 

Selfhood, The Struggle for, 
84: I. The Struggle for the 
Joy of Life, 87; II. The 
Struggle for the Worth of 
Life, 121; III. The Struggle 
for the Truth of Life, 163. 

Selfhood, The Truth of, 164; 
see Truth of Selfhood, The. 

Selfhood in Worth, 122. 

Selfishness — Selfhood in, 209. 

Sensational Inadequacy of 
Scientism, The, 63. 

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ash- 
ley Cooper, third Earl of, 
213, 236, 481. 

Shakespeare, William, 244, 
38r. 

Shaw, G. Bernard, 268. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 512. 

Sidgwick, Henry, 212, 213, 219, 
229, 235, 270. 

Skeptic, The Individual as, 
342: (1) Skepticism as Dil- 
ettantism, 343; (2) Social 
Skepticism, 349. 

Smith, Adam, 28, 131, 213, 
244, 251, 481, 485. 

Social, The Inadequacy of 
the, 252; 1. Lack of Life- 
content in Sociality, 253; 2. 
Lack of Life-character in 
Sociality, 263. 

Social Possibilities of Self- 
hood, 383. 

Social Sanction of Morality, 
The, 243. 

Social Skepticism, 349. 



59° 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



Social Source of Morality, 
The, 235. 

Sociality and Humanity, 486. 

Sociality, Lack of Life-char- 
acter in, 263. 

Sociality, Lack of Life-con- 
tent in, 253. 

Sociality, The Repudiation of, 
273 : I. Life the place of 
Joys, 274; II. Life the Place 
of Values, 304 ; III. Life 
the Place of Truths, 330. 

Sociality — Selfhood, Scientism, 
and, 5. 

Sociality and Truth, 332. 

Socialization of Life, The, 207 : 
I. The Transvaluation of 
Self and Society, 208; IT. 
The Practical Socialization 
of Life, 225; III. The In- 
adequacy of the Social, 252. 

Socialization of Life, The 
Practical, 225 : 1. The So- 
cialization of Work, 226; 2. 
The Socialization of Moral- 
ity, 234. 

Socialization of Morality, The. 
234: (1) The Social Source 
of Morality, 235; (2) The 
Social Sanction of Moral- 
ity, 243. 

Socialization of Work, The, 
226. 

Society, The Goal of Life in 
205 : Part One, The Sociali- 
zation of Life, 207 ; Part 
Two, The Repudiation of 
Sociality, 273. 

Society — The Transvaluation 
of Self and, 208; see Trans- 
valuation of Self and So- 
ciety, The. 



Socrates, 36, 47, 128, 164, 168, 
339, 38r, 430, 441- 469, 512. 
514, 515, 55i, 552. 

Solipsism — Selfhood and, 520. 

Sophocles, 319, 430, 462. 

Soul-states, The Independ- 
ence of, 97. 

Source of Morality, The So- 
cial, 235. 

Spencer, Herbert, 66, 69, 79, 
80, 120, 125, 143, 144, 147 
148, 151, 165, 166, 197, 201, 
231, 240, 241, 246, 249, 253, 
257, 334, 337, 397, 398, 419. 

Spinoza, Benedict, 54, 73, So, 
181, 187, 321, 439, 460, 467.. 
470, 548, 567. 

"Stendhal, De," (Marie Henri 
Beyle), 131, 137, 150, 153, 
154, 155, 156, 157, 161, 516. 

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 337. 

Stirner, Max, 21, 60, 85, 86, 
87, 99, 100, 125, 126, 135, 
137, 161, 164, 170, 175, 176, 

187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196. 
212, 213, 214, 317, 333, 334, 
336, 353, 369, 372, 374, 397- 
399, 419, 428, 439, 481, 516. 
517, 524, 529, 574- 

Strength — Selfhood in, 220. 
Strindberg*, August, 86, 187, 

188, 222, 268, 372.. 
Struggle for the Joy of Life, 

The, 87 ; see Joy of Life, 
The Struggle for. 

Struggle for Selfhood, The, 
84; see Selfhood, The Strug- 
gle for. 

Struggle for the Truth of 
Life, The, 163 ; see Truth of 
Life, The Struggle for. 

Struggle for the Worth of 



INDEX 



591 



Life, The, 121 ; see Worth 
of Life, The Struggle for 
the. 
Subjective, The Objective and, 

47- 
Subjectivity, The Essence of, 

564- 
Sudermann, Hermann, 96, 

125, 162, 244. 
Surrender to Naturalism, The, 

34- 

Symbolism, Symbolist, 118, 
145, 170, 208, 256, 289. 

Synthesis, The Aesthetic, 416 : 
1. The Aesthetic Synthesis 
with Nature, 417 ; 2. The 
Aesthetic Synthesis with 
Humanity, 426. 

Synthesis, The Hedonic, 480 : 
(1) Naturalism and Nihil- 
ism, 481 ; (2) Sociality and 
Humanity, 486. 

Synthesis, The Higher, 12 
363 : Part One, The Joy of 
Life in the World- Whole, 
366; Part Two, The Worth 
of Life in the World-Whole 
437; Part Three, The Truth 
of Life in The World- 
Whole, 509. 

Synthesis, The Intellectual 
555 : 1. Knowledge as In- 
terpretation, 556 ; 2. The Es- 
sence of Subjectivity, 564; 
3. The Character of Object- 
ivity, 572. 

Synthesis, The Practical, 480: 
1. The Hedonic Synthesis. 
480; 2. Value as Synthetic 
Principle, 494. 

Synthetic Principle — Value as, 
494: (1) Man as Valuer . 



496; (2) Humanity a 
World of Values, 501. 

Tao, Taoism, 137, 177, 34$, 
441. 

Thinker, The Self as, 21. 

Tolstoi, Count Leo, 106. 

Transmutation of Mind and 
World, The, 19: 1. The Self 
as Thinker, 21 ; 2. The Em- 
pirical Ego, 25. 

Transvaluat,ion of Self and 
Society, The, 208: 1. Self- 
hood in Selfishness, 209; 2. 
Selfhood in Strength, 220. 

Truth, Humanistic Criteria of, 
170. 

Truth — Humanity and, 338. 

Truth and Life, 331: (1) So- 
ciality and Truth, 332; (2) 
Humanity and Truth, 338 

Truth of Life, The Struggle 
for, 163: 1. The Truth of 
Selfhood, 164; 2. The 
Affirmation of the Self, 175; 
3. The Claims of Irreligion, 
186. 

Truth of Life in the Worid- 
Whole, The, 509: I. One's 
Own Self, 510; II. Knowl- 
edge as Intellectual Life, 
536; III. The Intellectual 
Synthesis, 555. 

Truth of Selfhood, The, 164: 
(1) The Passion for Pre- 
dication, 165 ; (2) Humanis- 
tic Criteria of Truih, 170. 

Truth — Sociality and, 332. 

Truth of Work in Nature, 
The, 439: (1) Work as 
Creative, 439; (2) Work as 
Intelligible, 444. 

Truths, Life the Place of. 



592 



THE GROUND AND GOAL OF HUMAN LIFE 



330: 1. Truth and Life, 331; 
2. The Individual as Skep- 
tic, 342. 

Turgenieff, Ivan Sergeyevich. 
73, 158, 159, 322, 323, 324, 
395, 474, 492. 

Turgot, Anne Robert Jac- 
ques, 248. 

Understanding as Human, The, 

537- 

Vedanta, 90, 178, 179, 441, 523. 

Vergil, 294. 

Verhaeren, Emile, 99. 

Verlaine, Paul, 118, 197, 198. 
201. 

Vico, Giovanni Battista, 248. 

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, 63, 
197, 198, 200, 201. 

Vinci, Lionardo da, 200 

Vision — Enjoyment as, 410. 

Vogue Eugene Marie Mel- 
chior, Vicomte de, 63. 

Volitional Impotence of 
Scientism, The, 70. 

Volitional — Values as, 31 t. 

Voltaire, 134, 165, 166, 279. 
285, 321, 395, 450. 

Value, The Humanistic Na- 
ture of, 304: (1) Value and 
Desire, 305 ; (2) Values as 
Volitional, 311. 

Values — Humanity as World 
of, 5or. 

Values, Life the Place of, 
304: 1. The Humanistic 
Nature of Value, 304; 2. 
The Individual as Pessi- 
mist, 318. 

Value as Synthetic Principle, 
494: (1) Man as Valuer, 
496; (2) Humanity a World 
of Values, 501. 



Values as Volitional, 311. 

Value of Work, The, 470. 

Wagner, Richard, 21, 24, 73, 
126, 131, 132, 137, 141, 151, 
186, 191, 192, 280, 281, 299, 
328, 329, 336, 344, 347, 353 ; 
419, 439, 463, 5i6. 

Wilde, Oscar, 162, 212, 214, 
221, 297, 298, 353, 374, 426, 

559- 

Will, The Pessimism of, 324. 

Winckelmann, Johann Joach- 
im, 31. 

Work, The Characteristic 
Element in, 452. 

Work, The Eudaemonist'c 
Element in, 448. 

Work, The Freedom of, 459. 

Work in Nature, The Truth 
of, 439: (1) Work as Crea- 
tive, 439; (2) Work as In- 
telligible, 444. 

Work, One's Own, 438: 1. The 
Truth of Work in Nature, 
439 ; 2. The Worth of Work.. 

447- 

Work, The Socialization of, 
226. 

Work, The Value of, 470. 

Work, The Worth of, 447: 
(1) The Eudaemonistic 
Element in Work, 448; (2) 
The Characteristic Element 
in Work, 452. 

World — The Transmutation 
of Mind and, 19; see Trans- 
mutation of Mind and 
World, The. 

World-Work, The Character 
of, 458: 1. The Freedom of 
Work, 459; 2. The Value of 
Work, 470. 



INDEX 



593 



Worth of Life, The Struggle 
for the, 121 : i. Selfhood in 
Worth, 122 ; 2. The Individ- 
ualistic Initiative, 133; 3. 
The Demands of Immoral- 
ism, 145. 

Worth of Life in the World- 
Whole, The, 437: I. One's 
Own Work, 438; II. The 
Character of World-Work, 



458; III. The Practical 
Synthesis, 480. 

Worth of Work, The, 447: 
(1) The Eudaemonistic 
Element in Work, 448; (2) 
The Characteristic Ele- 
ment in Work, 452. 

Wundt, Wilhelm Max, 60. 

Yoga, 137, 308. 

Zola, Emile, 64. 



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